EUGENE — To hear organist Paul Jacobs play Bach is a revelation. It’s not just that he’s a fine player, as indeed he is. It’s not even just his irrepressible joy in playing this music. It’s also – to borrow a phrase from the psychedelicists – a matter of “dose, set, and setting.” Because in this case, it’s about hearing The Art of Fugue in a legitimate Lutheran Church in Eugene right in the midst of this year’s Oregon Bach Festival.

That Jacobs memorizes the music is well-known; he made waves in 2000 when he performed all eighteen hours of Bach’s music composed specifically for organ from memory. He was twenty-three at the time, a mere undergrad finishing his first degree. He’s done the same with Messiaen’s nine hours of organ music, winning a Grammy in 2011 for his recording of Livre du Saint-Sacrement, and has recorded music by esteemed American maverick modernists as varied as Aaron Copland, Michael Daugherty, and Lou Harrison. At last year’s OBF, and again earlier this year, he blew everyone away with his interpretations of Franck, Geter, Ives, Mendelssohn, Saint-Saëns – and, of course, Bach.

What you might not know until you hear him play live (and see him, more on which in a moment) is how playful his playing is. This points not just to the performer but to the composer; it is perhaps too easily forgotten how playful Bach was, how playful his music still is.

Yet Bach’s imposing Art of Fugue is, as Jacobs said before settling down at Central Lutheran’s Brombaugh organ, “a ‘take no prisoners’ kind of work.” The density and intensity of Bach’s mature counterpoint come quite to a head with this one; Jacobs continued, “everything Bach is astonishing but these are inhuman.” So inhuman, in fact, that Jacobs decided to skip one of the absurdly difficult mirror fugues – no real loss, as the thing is inherently incomplete. He also skipped the four canons and the closing chorale you hear on many recordings labeled Art of Fugue. Even more strikingly, Jacobs stopped right in the middle of the final fugue, the “Fuga a 3 Soggetti,” which Bach left unfinished (deliberately or otherwise) upon his death in 1750.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

“Impossible”

As we’ve already seen, Jacobs had plenty to say in his brief pre-recital chat. He claimed that “it is impossible to capture the fullness of this work,” and encouraged the audience to “experience the majesty, let it flow over you” – and then revisit it, study it afterwards, listen to other takes. This recital, then, was to be only one instantiation of an endless experience, merely one incarnation of the ineffable and inexhaustible, a call to action. “Go thou and do likewise,” as the Man says.

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And then Jacobs sat down at the organ and delivered the sermon. Allow us to place you there with us. You are in a quaint, old-fashioned church of modern construction. The building itself was designed in the 1950s by Pietro Belluschi and was described in 2001 by historian G. Douglas Nicholl (writing for Oregon Historical Society) like this:

“The Eugene church, with its flat-roofed, box-like form, was a radical departure for a congregation used to more traditional forms, but the parishioners were so eager to vacate their 1904 structure that few resisted Belluschi’s design. The building is in marked contrast to the architect’s other Oregon churches. A person entering the narthex, the area that leads to the sanctuary, is immediately cut off from the outside. The nave is dark except for the light that comes through small, colored windows, and the chancel is distinguished by clear, screened light from the left. The sanctuary was not built until 1954-1955, after Belluschi had left the area, but it still retained his original concept. Central Lutheran is one of Belluschi’s less traditional church designs, but it has features that he would employ frequently, including richly textured brick, exposed laminated arches, and stained wooden screening.”

And indeed it is beautifully dark inside, a hearty Lutheran dark. The organ sits in the balcony up at the back of the sanctuary, which makes it hard to know where to sit. (The present author decided to sit close to the front, at the end of one pew, surrounded by fellow parishioners of all ages.) The altar up front – what classical audiences who don’t otherwise go to church think of as the stage – is empty, save for a screen upon which is projected the organ’s console. Hilariously, there is an inset screen showing the foot pedals.

Jacobs delivers his witticisms from that balcony, standing next to an organ that is not – by contrast with the organs you’re used to seeing (for instance the Jürgen Ahrend across the street in Beall Hall) – integrated into the building, pipes going up the walls and so on. No, this organ is all one piece, pipes looming over the console, a monster of an instrument, elegant and grotesque in the most beautiful possible way. What comes to mind is those biblical descriptions of angels, not the kind that look like European supermodels with wings and harps but the “wheels within wheels” kind with four faces and thousands of eyes covering their bodies. It’s not quite that surreal, but you get the idea.

It is not the only Joseph Brombaugh organ in town (the man himself lives there); this one was built for Central Lutheran in 1976 and is Brombaugh’s Opus 19. The pipes are mostly made from an alloy that is 98% lead. The tuning is Dr. Herbert Anton Kellner’s proposed “Bach Temperament,” a historically-informed temperament that uses five tempered fifths and seven pure fifths. (If you’ve only been listening to Bach on the stupid modern equal-tempered piano, you don’t even know what you’re missing; you can start down that rabbit hole here and here, if you’re feeling extra nerdy today.)

Central Lutheran’s longtime music minister, Dr. ElRay Stewart-Cook, describes Opus 19 as “one of the musical treasures of Western America.” Get a load of this glorious machine:

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Now, the Art of Fugue is not necessarily composed for organ; it is in open score (one clef per melodic line), which doesn’t rule out performance on a keyboard but doesn’t specifically require it. You can arrange it for string quartet (the Emerson Quartet and the Juilliard Quartet both made fine recordings), or for a group of viols (Phantasm’s recent recording is superb, as is Fretwork’s 2002 album), or for Baroque orchestra or modern orchestra or saxophone quartet or a cappella vocal group or Slovenian industrial band (try out Laibach’s Laibachkunstderfuge, if you dare).

Here’s Shunske Sato, who rocked the hell out of the Brandenburgs at this year’s OBF, leading Netherlands Bach Society through his own setting in 2021:

All of which makes it even more remarkable to hear a single human play it on one instrument. You have only your fingers, heels, and toes to separate the various melodic lines. You have to constantly pay attention to the registration, those vast timbral subtleties controlled by banks of handles (the “stops”) arrayed around the keyboards, the sort of thing that sets the organ apart from all other instruments, the sort of thing you have do on the fly, sometimes reaching over right in the middle of the fugue to change settings – a feature that added much to the joy of watching Jacobs play.

All of this while making the music sing and dance. One misstep and it can easily turn to mush.

What we got was not mush but perfection. Jacobs’ stated goal was to bring out the “emotional power” of a work that can easily be viewed as a mere intellectual exercise, and he succeeded tremendously. From the simple opening statement of that famous fugue subject – with its family resemblance to Bach’s other minor key fugue subjects – and first development, through the many permutations; the dense counterpoint and the relentlessly supple dance figures; the double fugues and the inversions, the expansions and contractions; the chorale-like simplicity and the daring chromaticism and the fugue upon the family name, B-A-C-H; all seriousness and all play and all “a song and a dance,” up to that famous mid-measure ending upon which “the author died” according to Johann Sebastian’s son Carl Philipp Emanuel:

Scholars can debate what C.P.E. meant by that – whether he was trying to sell people on the myth of his Great Father collapsing over his manuscript, or just saying “dad was still working on this when he died, that’s why it’s unfinished” – but either way you get this image of a man with the traditional Protestant Work Ethic staring into infinity. You could almost end this piece any time; or you could keep going for hours, days, centuries, an eternity. After each fugue, the audience sighed, a big collective sigh of religious ecstasy. How much of this bliss could you really take?

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“But, beloved, do not forget this one thing, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.”

2 Peter 3:8