Lenox — The Berkshire Bach Society (BBS) will screen Hilan Warshaw’s film “In the Key of Bach” at Tanglewood’s Linde Center on Saturday, March 21, at 3 p.m. The filmmaker will be present for a post-screening conversation with BBS Artistic Director and violinist Eugene Drucker, who will perform selections from Bach’s Partita No. 1 in B Minor.
The “Portals” series of the Berkshire Bach Society is designed as a set of intimate, exploratory programs that connect the music of Johann Sebastian Bach with other artistic ideas, historical contexts, or contemporary perspectives. Rather than presenting full Baroque concerts in the traditional sense, the series functions as a gateway into Bach’s world through conversation, chamber performance, and interdisciplinary presentation.
The name “Portals” reflects the concept: Each event opens a new entry point into Bach’s music. Programs may combine live performance, film, discussion, or lectures to illuminate aspects of Bach’s life, influence, and continuing cultural presence. The format is typically smaller and more conversational than the society’s main concerts.
Events in the series often feature Berkshire Bach’s artistic director, violinist Eugene Drucker, who performs excerpts of Bach’s works and leads discussions with guest artists, scholars, or filmmakers. These gatherings emphasize interpretation, listening, and reflection rather than formal concert presentation.
In essence, the “Portals” series treats Bach not only as a historical composer but as a living cultural presence, inviting audiences to approach his music through multiple intellectual and artistic pathways.
I asked a few questions of BBS Artistic Director Eugene Drucker via email last week. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Warshaw’s film tries to bring Bach’s personality to life, not just his music. As a performer who has lived with this repertoire for decades, what aspects of Bach’s character do you think listeners should keep in mind while watching the film?
We know that he could be stubbornly resistant to authority figures when they thwarted his aesthetic objectives or saddled him with too many tedious responsibilities. We also know that he was a deeply religious man; he didn’t compose sacred music (cantatas and the Passions) simply in order to fulfill commissions or his terms of employment. He believed in the stories and concepts embodied in his music, which was—and is—powerful enough to inspire or strengthen religious belief in his listeners.
You’ll be performing movements from Bach’s Partita No. 1 in B Minor before the screening. What does that music reveal about Bach that might not come across in a film or biography?
For most of the events in our ‘Portals’ series, I try to include a live performance component in order to provide a well-rounded experience for the audience members. They get a film screening, lecture presentation, or book reading; some live music (usually from me but sometimes involving other Berkshire Bach Society performers as well); a discussion between the guest presenter and myself; and the possibility to ask questions afterward. Partita No. 1 for solo violin reveals Bach’s command of stylized dance forms, like the Sarabande and Bourrée, as well as his ability to write thoroughly compelling variants of those movements, called Doubles.
Bach’s music is performed constantly around the world, yet people still feel they are discovering something new in it. Why do you think Bach continues to feel so immediate to modern audiences?
Bach’s music has extraordinary emotional and intellectual depth. Repeated listenings to the same music can yield opportunities to enter more deeply and more personally into one of the greatest and most complex minds in the history of Western music.
When you speak with Hilan Warshaw after the film, what are you most curious to ask him about his approach to telling Bach’s story?
I’m more familiar with Mr. Warshaw’s work on later composers. The first of his films that I saw was about Wagner’s relationship to Jews; the second, called ‘Secret Song,’ was a film about Alban Berg in which I appeared with my Emerson String Quartet colleagues as well as with the star soprano Renée Fleming. The film tells the story of Berg’s love affair with a married woman named Hanna Fuchs-Robettin and reveals the manifold ways in which he wove significant details of their relationship into the texture of the score. I also was fascinated by Hilan Warshaw’s film about Schoenberg’s personal life. A figure like Bach, who is so much more remote historically and about whose personal life far less is known, would need to be approached through a different lens, so to speak. Instead of digging for clues to a specific, scandalous mystery, as he did with Berg and Schoenberg—clues that provide context for the works they were composing at the time of great emotional upheavals—the documentarian who approaches Bach needs to gather and reconstruct more general information in an attempt to flesh out a fuller portrait of a great man. The goal is to travel through the centuries and bring him closer to us.
If someone attending this event thinks they already know Bach, what do you hope they might hear or understand differently by the end of the afternoon?
Bach had a lively sense of humor, as we can tell through his secular ‘Coffee Cantata.’ Hilan sets the story of a young woman’s addiction to coffee, which was all the rage in 18th-century Germany, at a trendy café in a modern American city. A young woman goes on a date with a hopeful potential boyfriend, who discovers to his chagrin that she has a morbid fascination with coffee and is simply using him to get more and more of it. It’s a slightly absurd story, but I’ve learned from musicologist George Stauffer (who was the guest for my previous ‘Portals’ event) that the women who served customers in the coffee-houses of Bach’s time might occasionally have provided other services as well—or at least so the story went, according to the caffeine prohibitionists of the day.
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The Linde Center for Music and Learning is located at 3 West Hawthorne Road in Lenox. Tickets and additional information are available here.
