The Carmel Bach Festival
Near Carmel, California
Every July for close to ninety years, the music of a German composer dead for more than two and a half centuries fills this small California village. The Carmel Bach Festival was founded in nineteen thirty five by two remarkable women, the pianist Dene Denny and the artist Hazel Watrous, who ran a gallery here and believed a tiny town could host world class music. They launched it as a short celebration timed to the two hundred fiftieth birthday of Johann Sebastian Bach, with concerts at the Sunset School auditorium and in the candlelit stone basilica of the Carmel Mission.
The very idea fit this village perfectly, a place already thick with poets, painters, and photographers who had decided that beauty was the whole point of a town. The festival never stopped. It grew into a weeks long summer institution drawing musicians and audiences from around the world, and it still performs Bach's masses and cantatas beneath the old mission's roof, where the sound of the choir rolls off the very sandstone that Junipero Serra's masons raised more than two centuries ago.
In a town that fought to keep its trees and its quiet, the music feels less like an event than a birthright.
