A lifetime

Why is Bach so difficult? For the past couple of months I've been working solely on the 3rd lute suite. Teacher Z insisted that I needed to learn a complete Bach suite. She's right, I've put it off for far too long. In fact, I'm starting to feel a little "Bached-out", overwhelmed by the number of possibilities this music presents. This truly is music intended to preoccupy you for lifetime, there's always something new to discover. A different way of delineating a piece of layered polyphony, a new way of identifying and phrasing thematic material, a different way of realising an ornament, the myriad types of metric stresses in the dance movements, applying inegale to some passages and of course, the almost incalculable possibilities of fingering the music.

Frank Bungarten has commented that he dislikes playing the lute suites owing to the number of changes required to the "perfect structure". I disagree. The diversity of interpretations available to this text is its greatest strength. It is of course also it's greatest difficulty. Bach will always be difficult to get "under the fingers" for this very reason. The musician can never help wondering if perhaps there is a "better way" of playing a passage. Ultimately, there can be no perfect, finalised reading of the lute suites. All that matters is that you've started a voyage of discovery that will last a lifetime.