Francesco Filidei’s Killing Bach
By Bil Smith
I have a weakness for a composer who gets himself into trouble and then has the technique to make the trouble worth our time. Francesco Filidei’s Killing Bach is a particularly satisfying example. Even the title takes a risk. Announce that you intend to kill Bach and you have given the audience every reason to suspect that the publicity may be better than the piece. Filidei earns his title, although the question of whether Bach can actually be disposed of becomes increasingly complicated.
What interests me is how much affection an undertaking like this requires. You have to know where the weight is carried before you can begin pulling a structure apart. Filidei’s engagement with Bach’s organ music has that intimacy. He has described his approach as a test of Bach’s powers of construction, with the interventions becoming progressively more devious and trivial. I like the admission of triviality. It introduces a certain embarrassment into the enterprise, the possibility that the person attacking the monument may expose more about himself than about the monument.
That is where the piece becomes especially interesting to me. Bach is an awkward adversary because the music can withstand an extraordinary amount of interference. Its relationships continue to matter even when their presentation becomes unstable. Damage one aspect and another seems to assume its structural responsibility. As a composer, I find this both exhilarating and slightly irritating. There are days when one would prefer the past to be a little less competent.
Filidei makes something substantial out of that irritation. The aggression has a compositional purpose, and its effectiveness depends on the precision with which it is placed. An interruption changes according to what we have been allowed to expect before it occurs. Arrive too soon and there is little to interrupt; arrive too late and the gesture becomes commentary on something already complete. I admire the discipline involved in making disruptive behavior carry the argument of a piece. It is demanding work, particularly when the result must retain a sense of danger.
I also appreciate the refusal to keep the orchestra well behaved. There is an enormous amount of etiquette attached to that body of musicians, much of it so familiar that we cease to notice it. We accept its arrangements of authority, its collective seriousness, its procedures for presenting the past. Killing Bach gives that institution a rather uncomfortable job. It has to participate in an assault on music whose authority it has helped maintain. The situation has theatrical force before anyone adds an explanation.
The humor is inseparable from this discomfort, although I hesitate to call the piece a comedy. Filidei himself has said that he considered it tragic and was surprised that it was taken as an attempt to be funny. That observation has stayed with me. It suggests a gap between what a composer believes he is doing and what an audience can bear to recognize. Sometimes laughter is the most readily available response to an event whose implications take longer to arrive.
I would hate to tidy that ambiguity away. The work gains from allowing us to enjoy gestures that may deserve a more troubled response. There is pleasure in seeing something revered subjected to indignity, and there is an equally strong impulse to protect it once the attack begins. Filidei gives both impulses room. He leaves the listener in the awkward position of encouraging the disturbance while remaining attached to what is being disturbed.
The 2015 Donaueschingen premiere, performed by the SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg under François-Xavier Roth, is preserved in the NEOS festival collection. At just under twenty-one minutes, the recorded work gives this confrontation enough space to become an argument with consequences.
My admiration for Killing Bach has a great deal to do with its lack of comfortable distance. Filidei is implicated in everything he does to this music. His knowledge enables the attack, and the attack keeps revealing the extent of his attachment. I recognize something of the composer’s predicament in that relationship. We spend years acquiring an inheritance and then have to discover what we can do in its presence.
There are plenty of tasteful ways to acknowledge Bach. Filidei has chosen a much more difficult encounter, and I am grateful for the nerve, intelligence and troublesome affection he brings to it. I would much rather spend time with a work prepared to risk looking foolish in the company of Bach than with another faultlessly respectful tribute. This one has something at stake.
