Gustaffson

It’s hard to speak of things that move us – a poem, a song, a painting. Harder still to speak of the accomplishments of an artist from whose works we learned there is a greatness that seems timeless and that lifts us. “I really like this”. “Listen!” are inadequate. The intellectual explanations painful. Still, we try. The Swedish poet Lars Gustafsson felt  – as do I about Bach – therre was music before him but nothing like him not even in the great contrapuntalists. He wrote,

The Stillness of the World Before Bach

There must have been a world before

the Trio Sonata in D, a world before the A minor Partita,

but what kind of a world?

A Europe of vast empty spaces, unresounding,

everywhere unawakened instuments

where the Musical  Offering, the Well-tempered Clavier

never passed across the keys.

Isolated churches

where the soprano line of the Passion

never in hopeless love twined around

the gentler movements of the flute,

broad soft landscapes

wherre nothing breaks the stillness

but old woodcutters’ axes,

the healthy barking of strong dogs in winter

and, like a bell,skates biting into fresh ice;

the swallows whirring through summer air,

the shell sounding at the child’s ear

and nowhere Bach nowhere Bach

the world in a skater’s stillness before Bach.

                              (translated: Philip Martin in The Stillness of the World Before Bach: New Selected Poems, 1982)