For Tolstoy, love meant preferring others to oneself. That notion also sheds light on Bach, another of those who, in the deepest sense, entrusted their heart to love. He loved so fully, with all his being, in the most carnal, indeed incarnate way, that his self-effacement has caused us forever to perceive in that something resembling a revelation of life, something that explains his universality: it is as though Bach’s music were the awareness of music itself, its assurance and its promise. Perhaps no one –Shakespeare excepted – was comparably able to transform every atom in the universe, every particle of the world into such profound yet also intimate emotion. Bach is the composer who unites, in their truest sense, the plenary tenderness of prayer with the solitary echo of the divine. He grasps space and makes it an infinite curve; he takes time and makes it a possibility of the future; he seizes a dance and it becomes a betrothal to celebrate. For those of us who see so dimly, he restores a vision: the belief that with Bach there is no limit, that he enjoins us to rediscover that to the full, in this practice of love that has an obligation to the living to expand their lives, to restore love to the epicenter of their hearts.
There is no longer any dispute over the urgency of our situation today. But one would be mistaken in regarding Bach as no more than a man of his time bearing witness to ours – because Bach is always in the process of becoming. Even in his own lifetime, he eluded his contemporaries who saw in him a relic of the past, not a prophet for all times and all people. What could then be more natural than to find him at the source of Liszt, Busoni or Rachmaninov? Bach was such an island in the middle of the river, free and unwavering in the midst of the currents and counter-currents, fed from the shore of the source and carried to the shore of hope. Between these two markers is a symbolic path which is the signature of all existence. Bach was not at all torn: he knew how to build bridges. He is always showing us, in a flash of transparent clarity, how to reconcile the pain in our days with the burst of light. (Hélène Grimaud)