DEMUS Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I (1955) - PAKM097

Jörg Demus was only twenty-six when, in July 1955, he recorded both books of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier at the Mozart-Saal of the Vienna Konzerthaus for Westminster. The undertaking was substantial: forty-eight preludes and forty-eight fugues, recorded in mono during that month. Book I appeared as the two-LP Westminster WAL 221; the complete cycle was subsequently issued as the five-LP WN 5501. The original Book I album even included a miniature score.

The timing is significant. Demus was already an experienced international performer, but his First Prize at the Ferruccio Busoni Competition still lay a year ahead. Bach, however, was hardly new territory. Demus had begun studying the Well-Tempered Clavier while still a student in Vienna and had memorised both books by his late teens. At twenty-one he performed the complete cycle in four recitals at the Brahms-Saal in Vienna during the Bach bicentenary year of 1950. Before making the Westminster recording he had therefore spent years living with this music in both study and performance.

What emerges from the recording is neither an attempt to make Bach monumental on the modern piano nor an imitation of the harpsichord. Demus uses the resources of the piano with unusual restraint. Pedalling is sparing, textures remain transparent and the contrapuntal voices retain their independence. Character comes principally through articulation, pacing, phrasing and the constantly changing relationships between those voices.

That approach divided opinion when the records were new. A brief contemporary Gramophone notice described Book I as “conscientious” but “unexhilarating”. Nathan Broder, reviewing WAL 221 in High Fidelity in September 1955, heard performances that were “small-framed” and understated. Yet he praised the cleanliness of Demus’s playing, his control of finger weight and the separation of the voices even in dense textures, and described the recording itself as first-rate. His objection was not to Demus’s execution but to what he perceived as a lack of intensity and breadth.

Two years later Broder remained unconvinced. Reviewing the complete WN 5501 cycle, he again praised playing that was “clean and beautifully controlled”, but thought it cool, insufficiently intense and too concerned with the surface of the music.

Those judgements are fascinating now because the qualities being criticised are substantially the same ones later listeners have come to value. Reviewing the Westminster Bach recordings in 2023, Jonathan Woolf praised Demus’s natural pacing, fluidity, clarity and avoidance of exaggeration, judging Book II, if anything, still finer than Book I. Rob Cowan, writing in Gramophone that April, repeatedly encountered a sense of “interpretative rightness” in Demus’s Bach and wondered whether modern listeners might now be more receptive to his comparatively unforced manner.

The reversal says something about changing fashions in Bach performance, but it also illuminates Demus himself. His lifelong interest in historical keyboards never turned into dogma. He believed that the modern piano could legitimately bring Bach to life through dynamics, articulation and agogic freedom, provided that these means served rather than obscured the music.

Demus would return repeatedly to Bach and later remake the Well-Tempered Clavier. Yet this youthful Westminster cycle remains one of the foundations of his recorded legacy. Heard more than seventy years after it was made, its lack of display seems less an absence than a choice: a young pianist already thoroughly at home in the music, allowing one of the great monuments of the keyboard repertoire to stand without scaffolding.