What does Bach's music mean to you, Mr. Hamoncourt? And how did your love of Bach actually begin?
The only work by Bach that I knew as a child was the St. Matthew Passion. I actually joined a church choir so that I could sing in it. I also played the Bach cello suites when I was 10 or 11. But when someone asked me what Bach meant to me, I replied that he was a mathematician, and that this wasn't truly great music! The same person wanted to know who my favourite composer was, and I promptly answered - Grieg. Today, of course, I can't understand how I could possibly have thought that! But in the St. Matthew Passion there were passages that touched me more deeply than any other music I knew - the very last suspension, or the first notes played by the oboe in "Ich will bei meinem Jesu wachen". That is a line where you can literally hear the watchman guarding the city wall, and the metaphor is extended to keeping watch over someone who is sick, or who does something wonderful during the night.
While I was at music college between 1948 and 1952, I met up with a small group of fellow students once or twice a week, and we played our way through the entire college library together, from Perotinus to Hindemith and Stravinsky. The size of the ensemble varied from five to twelve musicians, and one or two singers often joined us as well.We played arias from the Bach cantatas, and realised in the process that the performers in Bach’s time used different instruments. This was the period when I came to see sooner or later that Bach is simply the composer, a man head and shoulders above the other really great composers. Twenty or so years later, I would be saying that there were two such truly outstanding composers - Bach and Mozart. This is music where I want to hear every last note that they wrote; I shall always be moved by their music, and will never really grasp the fact that the authors of these works of genius were mere mortals. The fact is, Bach and Mozart weren't mortals - their pens were directed by some higher force. This convinced me that henceforth I had one single responsibility, namely to place myself in their service.
We played The art of Fugue on four viols while we were still students, and spent an entire year rehearsing it first! When we founded the Concentus Musicus Wien, we resolved not to play any Bach at all for the first couple of years - we didn't feel we had attained the necessary skill as yet. Only a few years later did we play the Triple Concerto together with Gustav Leonhardt, our new flautist and my wife. After that we gradually found our way to the vocal works, culminating in the 1963 recording of the St. John Passion with the Leonhardts in Berlin. After that, we played concertos and all manner of otherworks by Bach.

You're not someone who aspires to 'complete coverage' of any particular composer - yet you have performed and recorded the complete Mozart symphonies, and the complete Bach cantatas. Why all of them? In the case of the cantatas, one might argue that this was primarily functional music, written for use in church services.
From the moment when I learnt to distinguish the truly great geniuses from their less inspired colleagues - from "second-rank geniuses", if you will - I realised that a true genius doesn’t let a single note reach the public that fails to fulfil the very highest standards. When we started playing the Bach cantatas, we performed a few in concert that were quite new to us. And we were amazed by the fact that a composer can write and perform a new cantata every single Sunday of the year! Then the producer Wolf Erichson suggested that we record all the cantatas in a kind of Bach edition. This project entailed all kinds of problems, and we were fascinated by the idea of solving them. The score specifies "oboe da caccia"- what kind of instrument is that? Another passage calls for a "taille"; that’s an oboe tuned in F. But the oboe da caccia is also an oboe tuned in F. So why do they have two different names? \/\/hy does the term "como" appear over so many cantus firmi? What is that supposed to mean? Is it a type of instrument? Or does it indicate that that the cantus firmus requires something else at this point? We found ourselves stumbling from one tricky question to the next. Fortunately for us, Vienna has a superb musical instrument museum, and that helped us solve such questions.
One thing I didn't realise when we made the first recordings was that there is a radical difference between the notation of a work (NH: "Spiel-Notation") and the playing instructions (NH: "Spiel-Notation"). In Bach scores, you find both. He writes conventional notation in the score, although the performer is not intended to play what he sees on paper: a dissonance that disrupts the overall beauty must not find its way on to paper; a suspension is called for. A long note that is present in the harmony, but isn't supposed to be audible; it is written as a long note, but played as a short one.The articulation of the strings isn’t written down at all - the musician himself knows best how to play it. But on some occasions, Bach writes out the articulation precisely. Now you have to ask yourself whether the works where the semiquavers don't have any slurs should be played without slurs, while the works where they have slurs should be played with slurs? But they are exactly the same figures! That prompts me to say that one version is aimed at knowledgeable musicians, but when the performers were to be students, or pupils from St.Thomas's School who didn’t possess the requisite knowledge, Bach made sure to write out every tie, and from this we can learn how he intended the other works to be played that don’t have these slurs.

Contrary to your earlier custom, you transposed BWV 61 upwards by a tone for this recording, to B minor. Why?
In Weimar a high choir pitch was in use, and you can hear that the vocal parts in the Weimar cantatas are differently pitched; there are notes in the scores that were not singable in the Leipzig cantatas. The problem of the tuning pitch of organs is an interesting one: the cantata can either be written in the key of the organ, or it can be written in the key that the composer wants, and the organ is then transposed accordingly. This Bach did later on in Leipzig, where the organ parts are notated with the key transposed. But an organ, too, can have a lower register, a so-called Musizier-Gedackt, that was only used for the continuo accompaniment. Bach tried various solutions to this problem, and as a performer you have to find out time after time why the vocal parts are so high in one cantata and so low in another. It's simply not possible today to organise an organ tuned to a different pitch for each cantata that we perform in concert, so we proceeded along similar lines to Bach when he performed a Weimar work again in Leipzig: on such occasions, he transposed the cantata so that it could be performed in the same pitch as it had been in Weimar.

Why do you prefer working with a modern mixed choir nowadays rather than with a boys' choir?
The explanation is simple: boys’voices are breaking at an increasingly early age these days. Where the children in a boys’ choir are so young that most of them have no idea what they’re singing, the result is either a childlike sound, or the message that the music conveys is childlike. Some people like this a lot, but I don’t - it contradicts the seriousness and depth of the music. Or you decide not to wait forever until you find a choir that happens to consist of country children whose voices break later, and opt for a mixed choir instead.

Listening again to your old recording, I couldn't help but notice that there used to be a lot more pathos in the singing. Today, everything is sung and in a much more natural style.
I once sat down with a German theatre scholar and listened to the same monologue by the Austrian playwright Grillparzer in all the recordings made between 1908 and 1995. The early recordings were literally oozing with pathos, but at the time people didn't feel the pathos to be at all excessive, it was simply the spoken style of early 20th century theatre. As time passed, the language became more natural, the pathos was reduced, and the rhymes were clearly enunciated. And a generation after that,the audience wasn't supposed to hear the rhyme at all, it was supposed to sound like natural speech. So personally, I would attribute part of this difference to the spoken style currently in vogue. In the meantime there are older singers who have changed their style in the course of a longer career, and as a matter of fact, so have we. At the outset, we all believed that the old instruments can teach us a great deal: What can you play on these instruments? What kind of sound do they call for? But at the same time we were always aware that the man blowing into the mouthpiece is a 20th century man, and the sound produced is not a Baroque sound, but a 20th century one. It's quite wrong to think that we are trying to reproduce the performances of Bach's own time. I suspect Bach would laugh out loud if he could hear us! But of course he might like what he heard, he might find it interesting. To be honest, I imagine Johann Strauß would laugh as well if he heard us play, simply because of changing fashion. I don't see fashion as something negative myself, to me it consists in a constant and dialectic change.
One point is that our present-day point of view is closer to the original. Another is that we had to learn this language from scratch when we started out: we didn't know what role rhetoric plays, and it never featured on the curriculum at music college.What exactly does it mean to say that music follows the rules of language, and just how does it do so? We found some answers in historic teaching manuals that even transferred figures from rhetoric to certain musical figures, and we gradually understood it better, until it was just a matter of course, an everyday feature of our playing. The first time round, you're all excited about the discovery, and this causes you to exaggerate a little: We’ve found something unprecedented! We're not exaggerating, this is how it's meant to sound! So it's quite possible that a later recording of the same work sounds more natural; that's something you can only achieve by years of study and practice.