Liebster Jesu, wir sind hier – BWV 731 [video]

In this case there's a pedal point in the bass-- that is, it just keeps repeating the same note as the harmonies above it change. So when that bass finally begins to move and then anchors a fifth above for the next phrase of music, it's about as aurally striking as music can get.

It's also important from the standpoint of musical drama. Imagine someone tells you a story and gives you the essential setting in the first 17 seconds. Then over the next 10 seconds they begin to describe what sounds like the story's rising drama. Now you have an expectation for the form of this short story, and you start to listen more intently.

However, they then begin laying out another, closely related setting followed by its own little internal conflict. Finally this leads to a description of a setting that sounds like an intensified and more detailed version of the original setting. Only then do they finish the actual exposition of their story and move into the rising action.

At some point in all of that you're going to get the sense that this is a much more involved story than you had initially anticipated. You're also going to anticipate that the rising action itself is going to last a lot longer than 17 seconds.

That's a fitting dramatic arc for introducing the listener to the subject matter of St. Matthew Passion.

Also, to better answer the question about listening vs. analyzing notes: I just sang the opening melodies to myself to get the durations for the analogy above. I originally got the idea about the exposition-of-expositions walking somewhere and being struck by the relative brevity of the fugue subject compared to the gravity of that movement. (As well as the fact that the entire inner exposition reappears twice later in the piece, which AFAICT never happens in any of the other music Bach's wrote.)

There is of course a long-standing debate over music for the ears vs. music for the eyes. But I don't think this falls into that at all-- everything I'm describing can be heard and weighed with a musician's ear in the same way an experienced coder can make an assessment that some code "smells", etc.

Generally he very much gets it about the sense or meaning of the music, at least as I understand it.

I wondered what he was going to do for the last parts of the first D Minor section, and he was really good! There he made good use of some of the advantages of a guitar to make the notes sharp (with correct intonation! -- easier on guitar than violin!) and distinct in a musically appropriate way.

For the first parts of the central D Major section, he got the slow, delicate, maybe even pleading sweetness very nicely. As that section grew in passion, there are many triplets; these can be made to sound more passionate by being insistent, and he did well with that.

There are places in the music where the music jumps quickly down an octave or two, and, really, usually there needs to be some connection or legato between the two -- sometimes he does this and sometimes not. An interpretation of the jump is that the lower notes are a fast answer or response to the upper ones; then it's good to have the two sound connected. Or, the music is a diagram of someone in doubt and considering something; the upper notes are the current guesses, and the lower notes are a fast return to thinking the person is more confident about.

Maybe that music is like a guy trying to woo a girl and thinking (A) I really want to take her to that five star French restaurant BUT (B) I might look like irresponsible with money; (A) I really want to show her I care BUT (B) it's important to be careful with money; etc.

To me the climax of the piece is at the end of the central D Major section; have to play on all four strings of the violin, and the highest notes on the E string can result in a soaring impression, rising to something glorious -- Bach was not short on passion. There is a lot to interpret in those last few bars of that section. There the guitar might have tried again.

Just after the end of the D Major section is the final section, in D Minor, and the beginning of that section is confused as a catharsis or release from the soaring passion just before (Bach was something of an applied human emotional psychologist, that is, a good artist!). Well, for that catharsis, the guitarist might have tried again.

At the beginning, with just the D Minor tonic chord, he could have used more legato, made the sounds last a little longer, still within what a guitar can do. That is, clearly indicate for the listener that chord because it is central to the whole piece.

There's a story of a guitarist in the audience of a concert. He happened to be sitting next to composer Castelnuovo-Tedesco, known to be a man of few words. Before the concert, the guitarist said to the composer "The Bach Chaconne sure is difficult to play." The composer said nothing but when the concert was over said "The Bach Chaconne is the greatest piece of music ever written". I wouldn't argue with that. Playing it, even while learning to play it and playing it badly, is fun beyond belief -- get to replace own commonly limited voice with that of a violin, piano, guitar, or even a full orchestra (e.g., Stokowski) and Bach's music to scream out to the heavens the passion of the human spirit -- great fun!

Bach was one heck of a musician!

Also, research suggests that the story of Bach dying before finishing the final fugue in Art of Fugue is inaccurate. An analysis of the paper in the extant manuscript, the tools used to draw the staff lines, and the simple realization that there is no way even Bach could have undertaken such a huge work without deriving the final combination of the fugal subjects before hand, all point to a completion in the year 1747 or 1748, but lost. The fragment that survives is likely to be a rough draft.

I wrote my senior paper in undergrad on this.

In fact the last work completed by the master is believed to be the "Et Incarnatus Est" in second (later) half of the B minor mass.