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Music that soars where words leave off, as Heine would have it, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet simply photograph the artists at work. Camera over the shoulder for hands on a harpsichord, it pulls back in a transcendent moment to reveal the rest of the ensemble joining in, allegro. Engravings of pointy Teutonic cityscapes, notations on manuscripts like hieroglyphs. "A particularly strong desire to hear as many good organists as possible" makes for a thoroughgoing education, Bach and his triumphs and setbacks, Gustav Leonhardt dons the peruke and tickles the ivories. The image is a chamber crowded with turned-away, dark-coated figures and the composer conducting in the background, visual and sonic purity is sought and achieved, Carl Marcus Tuscher is a stylistic mainstay. Real locations, period instruments, uninterrupted performances. Anna Magdalena (Christiane Lang) recites diary passages, the premature deaths of several of their children are recounted over a shot of towering organ pipes. Brandenburg Concerto No. 5, Magnificat BWV 243, St. Matthew Passion, Ascension Oratorio... "A well-sounding harmony, for God's glory and the permissible pleasure of the soul" is the aim, all else is "devilish droning." Utmost sensation out of utmost rigor, the great Straub-Huillet paradox, the biopic shaved to its serene essence. Immaculate arrangements of cellists and flutists and archways and statuary, austere interiors punctuated by the occasional view of rocky shores. (The St. Thomas School in Leipzig is evoked via a blatant rear-projection, an effect out of Syberberg or Hitchcock.) Portrait of the aesthete-laborer, cf. Ulmer's Carnegie Hall, matter of funding and freedom and capricious patrons. Baroque diagonals in churches and opera houses, a lost world seen and heard. The Art of Fugue, interrupted, the dying of the light. Sightless eyes peer out the window at the close, "softly and blessedly." Russell is just around the corner with the useful antithesis of The Music Lovers. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |