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One of the Best Books of the Year
*�The Economist�*�The Christian Science Monitor�*�Financial Times *
Johann Sebastian Bach is one of the most unfathomable composers in the history of music. How can such sublime work have been produced by a man who seems so ordinary, so opaque—and occasionally so intemperate?
John Eliot Gardiner grew up passing one of the only two authentic portraits of Bach every day on the stairs of his parents’ house, where it hung for safety during World War II. He has been studying and performing Bach ever since, and is now regarded as one of the composer’s greatest living interpreters. The fruits of this lifetime’s immersion are distilled in this remarkable book, grounded in the most recent Bach scholarship but moving far beyond it, and explaining in wonderful detail the ideas on which Bach drew, how he worked, how his music is constructed, how it achieves its effects—and what it can tell us about Bach the man.
- Sales Rank: #116769 in Books
- Published on: 2015-03-03
- Released on: 2015-03-03
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.16" h x 1.35" w x 6.10" l, 1.98 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 672 pages
Review
“Lively, argumentative and passionate. . . . In performance and now in print, Mr. Gardiner is Bach's most eloquent champion.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“Fresh, persuasive. . . . As eloquent a writer as he is a musician, Gardiner brings to his study the invaluable perspective of the practitioner.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“So thoughtful, well-researched, and beautifully written that it should satisfy both the well-informed enthusiast and readers simply seeking to become better acquainted with a musical giant. . . . It never happens often enough, but now and then, a subject gets the book it deserves. So it is with John Eliot Gardiner’s�Bach.”
—The Daily Beast
�
“A nuanced account. . . . [Gardiner] writes with the care of a scholar, the knowledge of an expert musician, and the passion of a believer.”
—The Christian Science Monitor
“It is hard to imagine what the English maestro John Eliot Gardiner . . . might do to surpass Bach in its commitment, scope and comprehensiveness. . . . [He] has done a masterly, monumental job of taking the measure of Bach the man and the musician.”
—The New York Times
“It is Gardiner’s experience as a conductor that informs so much of this book. Not only does he explain the harmonic, contrapuntal and polyphonic underpinnings of Bach’s music . . . he also comments on these scores from practical experience, having spent countless hours working out instrumental balances and sonorities, textures and dynamics, in concert halls and churches alike.”
—The Washington Post
“Monumental. . . . What Gardiner offers is an intimate knowledge of the choral music . . . and a powerful sense of its cultural context, structural evolution and doctrinal intent. . . . His ‘portrait’ reads like a pilgrim’s progress, in which a privileged man-of-the-modern-world is transformed by Bach’s musical revelation.”
—Financial Times
“Very rewarding. . . . This book is not a biography in the conventional sense . . . but an attempt to uncover the man through his music. . . . [Gardiner] discovers a wealth of hitherto unseen invention and ingenuity.”
—The Economist
“An inspiring book. . . . Superb, timely, thought-provoking, authoritative and extremely useful and readable. . . . It should find its way onto any serious music-lover’s shelves. From there it must often and regularly be taken off and read.”
—Classical.Net
“An erudite work resting on prodigious research and experience and deep affection and admiration.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Typical John Eliot to combine so much erudition with even more passion and enthusiasm. It made me want to rush and listen to all the pieces whether familiar or unfamiliar. A treasure chest.”
—Simon Rattle, principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic
“Bach is a unique portrait of one of the greatest musical geniuses of all time by one of the greatest musical geniuses of our own age. John Eliot Gardiner uses his extraordinary immersion in Bach’s music to illuminate Bach the man more brilliantly than in any previous work, and has created his own deeply moving work of art.”
—Amanda Foreman, author of A World on Fire
“A superb achievement, scholarly, lively, controversial and judicious. Like all great biographies of creative artists it builds a bridge from the past to the present and brings the work to new life.”
—Ian Bostridge
“A tremendous feat of narrative. . . . [Gardiner] tells this long and richly involved story in a way that makes everything clear, and sets the life and the music in a historical perspective where every detail is relevant and every comment illuminating. Simply as a biography this is splendid, but the fact that it comes with such a wealth of musical understanding and experience makes it invaluable. I learned an enormous amount, and I know I'll return to it again and again.”
—Philip Pullman
About the Author
John Eliot Gardiner is one of the world’s leading conductors, not only of Baroque music but across the whole repertoire. He founded the Monteverdi Choir and Orchestra, the Orchestre de l’Op�ra de Lyon, the English Baroque Soloists, and the Orchestre R�volutionnaire et Romantique. He has conducted most of the world’s great orchestras and in many of the leading opera houses. He lives and farms in Dorset, England.�
Excerpt. � Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1
Under the Cantor’s Gaze
In the autumn of 1936 a thirty-year-old music teacher from Bad Warmbrunn in Lower Silesia suddenly appeared in a Dorset village with two items in his luggage: a guitar and a portrait in oils of Bach. Like old Veit Bach, the founder of the clan, escaping from Eastern Europe as a religious refugee almost four centuries earlier, Walter Jenke had left Germany just as Jews were being banned from holding professional posts. He settled and found work in North Dorset, married an English girl and, with war imminent, looked for a safe home for his painting. His great-grandfather had purchased a portrait of Bach in a curiosity shop sometime in the 1820s for next to nothing. Doubtless he did not know at the time that this was – and still is – by far the most important Bach portrait in existence. Had Jenke left it with his mother in Bad Warmbrunn, it would almost certainly not have survived the bombardment or the evacuation of Germans from Silesia in the face of the advancing Red Army.
I grew up under the Cantor’s gaze. The celebrated Haussmann portrait of Bach1 had been given to my parents for safekeeping for the duration of the war, and it took pride of place on the first-floor landing of the old mill in Dorset where I was born. Every night on my way to bed I tried to avoid its forbidding stare. I was doubly fortunate as a child in that I grew up on a farm and into a music-minded family where it was considered perfectly normal to sing – on a tractor or horseback (my father), at table (the whole family sang grace at mealtimes) or at weekend gatherings, outlets for my parents’ love of vocal music. All through the war years they and a few local friends convened every Sunday morning to sing William Byrd’s Mass for Four Voices. As children my brother, sister and I grew up getting to know a grand miscellany of unaccompanied choral music – from Josquin to Palestrina, Tallis to Purcell, Monteverdi to Sch�tz, and, eventually, Bach. Compared to the earlier polyphony, Bach’s motets, we found, were a lot more difficult technically – those long, long phrases with nowhere to breathe – but I remember loving the interplay of voices, with so much going on at once, and that pulsating rhythm underneath keeping everything afloat. By the time I was twelve I knew the treble parts of most of Bach’s six motets more or less by heart. They became part of the primary matter in my head (along with folksongs, ribald poems in Dorset dialect and heaven knows what else, stored in my memory) and have never left me.
Then, during my teens, I came to know some of his instrumental music: the Brandenburg Concertos, the violin sonatas and concertos (with which, as a distinctly average fiddle-player, I often struggled – and usually lost – between the ages of nine and eighteen, at which stage I switched to the viola), some of the keyboard pieces and several cantata arias for alto, of which my mother was very fond. Even now I cannot hear arias such as ‘Gelobet sei der Herr, mein Gott’ (‘The Lord be praised’) or ‘Von der Welt verlang ich nichts’ (‘I ask nothing of the world’) without a lump in my throat, remembering her voice floating across the courtyard from the mill-room. But my early apprenticeship in Bach, the nurturing of a lifelong engagement with his music and a longing to understand the stern Cantor at the top of the stairs, I owe to four remarkable teachers – three women and one man – who helped to determine the kind of musician I was to become.
The man was Wilfred Brown, the great English tenor, who visited my school when I was fourteen, singing both the Evangelist and the tenor arias in a performance of Bach’s John Passion. I was so captivated that, unpardonable in a principal second violin, at one point I stopped playing altogether and just gawped. As an interpreter of Bach’s Evangelist, Bill Brown was nonpareil. His singing was characterised by an extraordinary subtlety of inflection and word-painting, and by a pathos that was inseparable from his own Quaker beliefs and the humility they brought, something I recognised from my mother’s Quaker upbringing. Later on he offered to give me singing lessons from the time I was sixteen until I was twenty-two, sometimes travelling to Cambridge to do so and always refusing a fee.
Imogen Holst, daughter of Gustav and amanuensis to Benjamin Britten, was a regular visitor to my parents’ home and sometimes led their choral weekends and gave singing lessons to me and my sister. She, I suppose more than any other musician I had encountered at that early stage, stressed the importance of dance in Baroque music. This was so clearly visible in her own interpretation and her way of conducting Bach that someone once filmed her just from the waist downwards while conducting the B minor Mass. To this day, thanks to Imo, I feel that the worst interpretative sin (committed with painful regularity even now) is to plod in Bach; denying or resisting the rhythmical elasticity and buoyancy of his music ensures that its spirit shoots out of the door. In speaking touchingly of her father, she stressed the indispensability of music, that it was a part of life that ‘can’t be done without’.
Letting Bach dance was one lesson well learnt; the other was how to make him ‘sing’. This sounds so obvious and so much easier than it is in practice. Not all of Bach’s melodies are singer-friendly or melodious in the way that, say, Purcell’s or Schubert’s are. Often angular, the phrase-lengths uncomfortably long, peppered with little curlicue flourishes and ornaments, they require a lot of purpose, underpinned by iron breath-control, before they can truly sing. And that applies not just to the vocal lines, but to the instrumental ones as well. This I learnt from my violin teacher, Sybil Eaton, a pupil of the celebrated Greek violinist and musicologist Minos Dounias. Sybil certainly ‘sang’ when she played the fiddle, but, through her inspirational teaching and sheer love of Bach, she was also able to help her pupils to take melodic wing, whether we were playing concertos, solo partitas or obbligato parts to arias from the Passions or the cantatas.
The person who crystallised all these ideas for me was Nadia Boulanger, justly recognised as the most celebrated teacher of composition in the twentieth century. When she accepted me as a student in Paris in 1967, she had just turned eighty and was partially blind, but with all her other faculties in tip-top order. Her way of teaching harmony was founded on Bach’s chorales, which she regarded as models of how to establish a beautiful polyphony – with each voice being accorded equal importance while still playing a different role in the four-way conversation, now advancing, now retreating: contrapuntally conceived harmony, in other words. She insisted that the freedom to express yourself in music, whether as a composer, conductor or performer, demanded obedience to certain laws and the possession of unassailable technical skills. One of her favourite sayings was ‘Talent [by which I think she meant technique] without genius is not worth much; but genius without talent is worth nothing whatsoever.’
Confined for two years to an unvarying diet of harmony and counterpoint exercises and solf�ge (the particularly nasty but effective French system of ear-training), I metaphorically kicked and scratched like a cornered animal. On at least one occasion, from sheer frustration, Hindemith’s Elementary Training for Musicians ended up in the gutter – thrown out of the window of my bed-sit in the 4th arrondissement. But I owe her a colossal debt. She had a way of challenging every preconception as well as a knack of exposing one’s shortcomings, technical or otherwise, quite mercilessly. She saw something in me that I did not even see in myself. It was only after I had left the boulangerie that I realised that what had seemed like torture at the time was actually an act of kindness, equipping me to avoid certain professional embarrassments in the future. And, despite her severity, she was extraordinarily generous, even bequeathing to me her unique collection of transcriptions of Renaissance and Baroque music (from Monteverdi to Rameau), including scores and parts of her favourite Bach cantatas, all meticulously annotated – some of my most treasured possessions.
How was I to translate this painfully acquired theory and ear-training into actual sound when standing in front of a choir and orchestra? Luckily by this stage (1967–8), while I was a student in Paris and Fontainebleau, from time to time I had access to an ‘instrument’ in London – the Monteverdi Choir. It had all started back in 1964 when I was in my third year at Cambridge. My tutor, the social anthropologist Edmund Leach, authorised me to take a year off from the History tripos to sieve through the possible directions my life might take and, crucially, to find out whether I really had it in me to become a full-time musician. Ostensibly I was there to read Classical Arabic and medieval Spanish; in practice the task I set myself was to perform Monteverdi’s 1610 Vespers, a work that, although I had first heard it as a child, was still very little known and had never before been performed in Cambridge. Despite the dual handicap of my relative inexperience as a conductor and my little formal musical training up to that point, I had set my heart on conducting one of the most challenging works in the choral repertoire. I spent the best part of that year studying the original part-books on microfilm and, with the encouragement of the Professor of Music, Thurston Dart, preparing a new performing edition. I also ended up doing everything involved in planning a public performance in King’s College Chapel – from assembling and training the choir and orchestra, to having the tickets printed and putting out the chairs.
Vibrant colour contrasts and passionate declamation seemed to me to be the hallmark of this music. The test for me was whether I could draw any of that from a group of student singers trained in a totally different tradition. To that extent the Monteverdi Choir started life as an anti-choir – in reaction to the well-mannered euphony and blend which characterised the celebrated chapel choir at King’s in my day, whose mantra was ‘Never louder than lovely’. Their style was summed up for me by a performance, at Boris Ord’s memorial service, of Jesu, meine Freude – that most extended and interpretatively challenging of Bach’s motets – sung in English with effete and lip-wiping prissiness: ‘Jesu . . .’ (pronounced Jeez-ewe), followed by a huge comma and expressive intake of breath, ‘. . . priceless treasure’ (pronounced trez-ewer). I seethed. How had the wonderfully exultant music that I had known since I was a child come to be treated in such a precious, etiolated way? Was this not like adding a layer of face powder and a few beauty spots to the dour old Cantor’s portrait?
My first attempt at performing Monteverdi’s masterpiece took place in March 1964 with some of the same performers. It fell a long way short of the ideals I had set for it, yet people who heard it were encouraging, even enthusiastic. For me it was not just a test of skill, but the epiphany I had been searching for. The decision was made: better to follow an overwhelming passion, even one that would need years of study and practice and with absolutely no guarantee of success, than to pursue safer career paths for which I might already have had the rudimentary technical qualifications. I was encouraged to persist in my rebellion against the vestiges of Victorian performance and to find a more permanent footing for the Monteverdi Choir. My starting-point, then as now, was to bring passion and expressivity to the vocal music of the Baroque, and, as appropriate, to the nationality, period and personality of the composer. In a typical programme, such as we gave in the Cambridge Festival in 1965, devoted to music by Monteverdi, Sch�tz and Purcell, we set out to enable listeners to hear the idiosyncratic approach of each master sung in the original language, to follow each composer as he experimented with music based on recitation over a figured bass line and revelled in the new expressive range it offered. It was heady stuff, and our efforts were doubtless crude and exaggerated; but at least they did not sound half-baked or indistinguishable from Anglican pieties during a wet November Evensong.
I was desperately short of working models. Nadia Boulanger no longer conducted. Nor did Thurston Dart, from whose Sherlock Holmes-like approach to musicology I had learnt a great deal in the postgraduate year that I studied with him after he moved to King’s College, London. I did, however, have the luck to observe the distinguished keyboard virtuoso and conductor George Malcolm. George knew how to draw dazzling performances of a most un‑English ardour from his choir at Westminster Cathedral, and, amazingly, he took the trouble to travel up to Cambridge to hear my first Vespers performance. Here was a true master and, I felt, a kindred spirit, whose approbation and encouragement at that stage made all the difference to me, although he had virtually given up choral conducting.
Then, at a friend’s invitation, I went to hear Karl Richter conduct his Munich Bach Choir in 1967. Richter was acclaimed as the foremost exponent of Bach’s choral music at the time, but even his muscular LP recordings of cantatas hadn’t prepared me for the oppressive volume and sheer aggression of the motet Singet dem Herrn as delivered by seventy lusty Bavarians from the gallery of the Markuskirche. This was a world apart from the mincing ‘holy, holy’ approach of King’s or the Bach Choir in London in their annual Good Friday Matthew Passion outing at the Royal Festival Hall, but hardly more inspiriting. Nor did Richter’s thunderous approach to the Goldberg Variations next day on a souped‑up Neupert harpsichord, given in the Musikhochschule (Hitler’s former residence), do much to restore my faith. Here, as in most of the live performances or recordings that I had access to, Bach came over as grim, sombre, po‑faced, lacking in spirit, humour and humanity. Where was the festive joy and zest of this dance-impregnated music? A few years later I heard a performance of the John Passion under Benjamin Britten, a very fine conductor who combed out the separate strands of Bach’s elaborate counterpoint before my ears, revealing the work’s drama from the inside. Yet, even so, to me it sounded fatally ‘English’. I felt a similar disappointment when I first heard Mozart played in Salzburg and Vienna in 1958: the elegant surface of the playing seemed to overlay and disguise the turbulent emotional inner life of the music.
Most helpful customer reviews
235 of 246 people found the following review helpful.
A Report from the Field
By Bach Lover
This is, and I am sure it will continue to be, one of the most interesting, well researched and valuable of books written on J.S. Bach and his times to date. I began it the day it arrived and have barely put it down. That is saying a lot as I have been buying and listening to and reading about Bach for the past 50+ years.
Just a quarter of the way into its more than 600 pages, I can report that this book should prove to be invaluable to anyone interested in Bach, the Baroque, and the musicians of that era and before. It is Gardiner's clear and compelling writing, the depth of his research, and his emphasis on Bach's life that is so very compelling. Who was Bach? Why was he that way? And how did his life shape his music? Answering these questions are the objectives of the book. He does it better than anyone I have read. There is much new information discovered only in the last decade or more.
I will revise this review when I've finished reading, but I wanted to send a dispatch that in the first four chapters, this is proving to be a wonderful and instructive read. And a last note: the footnotes are terrific.
45 of 47 people found the following review helpful.
John Eliot in the Castle of Heaven
By Johannes Climacus
I do not mean to derogate from Sir John Eliot Gardiner's status as one of the great luminaries of the podium in our age--to say nothing of his status as a pioneer and perfecter of period performance practice--but in the end the capstone of his career might well turn out to have been in the medium of prose rather than musical performance! This is, quite simply, the most fascinating, engrossing, erudite and stunningly written work on the Leipzig Cantor available. Too bad it focuses primarily on his sacred music (I would love to have Gardiner's obiter dicta on many of the keyboard, chamber and orchestral works treated only tangentially here); but within that limited scope, Gardiner has achieved something quite remarkable: a work of musical historiography that manages to combine rigorous scholarship with philosophical acumen and literary flair. As a philosopher with a keen interest in the interface between aesthetics and religion, I particularly appreciated Gardiner's thorough understanding of the exigencies of church music within the Lutheran tradition, and his situating of tht tradition within the larger framework of Church history, scriptural exegesis and Christian spirituality. His effort to discern Bach's character and aspirations from his church music rather than principally from the documentary evidence (which is relaitvely meager) fixes the reader's (and listener's) attention where it must always begin and end--namely, with the scores themselves, as performed and heard. His charting of Bach's creative development, through the seasons and struggles of his career calls our attention anew to the status of the sacred music--particularly the Cantatas--as a kind of spiritual journal recounting the consolations and desolations of a fragile, fallible genius who also happened to be something of a mystic. For Gardiner, in the end, Bach's sacred-musical testament amounts to the bravest and most brilliant of stands against the depredations of our human condition at its most terrifying--and *for* the transcendence to the rapture of creativity fitfully but effectually points.
I cannot recommend this work highly enough. Its pages will afford a fresh encounter with the composer, even if you have been studying his works and his commentators (as I have) for nearly a lifetime. But even more tellingly perhaps, you will encounter John Eliot Gardiner in a new way--as an accomplished writer and winsomely humane scholar.
82 of 94 people found the following review helpful.
An outstanding revelation of Bach's choral works for those who know music.
By Amazon Customer
I really like this book, although I probably won't finish it. I have about 50 of Gardiner's cantata recordings and other works but I am not a musician and don't read music. The book is a wonderful synthesis of historical information on Bach and Gardiner's intuitions derived from his intimate knowledge of the music, especially the choral works. But I can't "hear" the music when Gardiner describes it, and I can't read he notes he shows.
This book cries out for a total multimedia treatment. When JEG mentions a phrase or musical element, I'd like to be able to click and hear it. I've been to one of his lecture concerts and to several of Helmut Rilling's and that's whee I really learn. I'm really sorry the book can't quite give me that.
All that said, I really like this book. I recommend it to anyone who's willing to deal with the issues.
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