Vistas & Byways Spring 2016

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  • LATEST V&B ISSUE
  • Welcome
  • Focus
  • Table of Contents
    • Bay Area Stew
    • Fiction
    • Nonfiction
    • Poetry
    • Visual Arts
    • Inside OLLI
    • V&B Forum
  • Contributors
  • Submissions
  • About Us
  • Staff and Contacts
  • LATEST V&B ISSUE

Picture
photo by Jane Bell Goldstein

Magnificat
for J.S. Bach
by Diane Frank


​It was the old man’s 285th birthday,
and I mean the virtuoso, the illuminata, Johann Sebastian Bach.
I was a university student, and to celebrate
almost three centuries of musical genius,
our conductor set up a twenty hour marathon concert
starting early in the morning.
All day, the university’s music and choral students
migrated in and out of the auditorium,
with motets, cantatas, solos, quartets and concertos.
Early in the afternoon, our bare-footed organist
played the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor,
then a prelude he played entirely with his feet.
I was amazed at his synergy of dance and sound.
 
The concertmaster from my first year in the orchestra
returned to play the Violin Partita in D minor
with his eyes closed. No music stand
as he tuned to an inner singing.
Then the entire orchestra walked onto the stage
to play the Second Brandenburg Concerto,
the Concerto for Two Harpsichords,
the Concerto for Three Harpsichords,
the First Orchestral Suite,
and later, just after sunset, the Magnificat.
I was playing cello next to the harpsichord,
inside the sway of its musical body,
surrounded by tones that took me back
to an earlier century.
 
That night, I had my first experience of musical transcendence.
The moon was glowing through stained glass.
On the stage, we were playing the Magnificat.
Inside, we were flying in other-worldly ecstasy,
and it stayed that way for the rest of the night.
By 10:00 that night, I could swear the maestro was there,
listening and sometimes playing with us.
Years later, on the other side of the continent,
one of my private pleasures is playing the Bach Cello Suites
late at night, with no one listening.
And sometimes, by the ocean
with the moon glowing towards full,
the old man whispers to me.

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