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Bach
Cover of Bach
Bach
Music in the Castle of Heaven
Borrow Borrow

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 (when we can discern his personality at all) 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 morning and evening 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.
Gardiner’s background as a historian has encouraged him to search for ways in which scholarship and performance can cooperate and fruitfully coalesce. This has entailed piecing together the few biographical shards, scrutinizing the music, and watching for those instances when Bach’s personality seems to penetrate the fabric of his notation. Gardiner’s aim is “to give the reader a sense of inhabiting the same experiences and sensations that Bach might have had in the act of music-making. This, I try to show, can help us arrive at a more human likeness discernible in the closely related processes of composing and performing his music.”
It is very rare that such an accomplished performer of music should also be a considerable writer and thinker about it. John Eliot Gardiner takes us as deeply into Bach’s works and mind as perhaps words can. The result is a unique book about one of the greatest of all creative artists. 

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 (when we can discern his personality at all) 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 morning and evening 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.
Gardiner’s background as a historian has encouraged him to search for ways in which scholarship and performance can cooperate and fruitfully coalesce. This has entailed piecing together the few biographical shards, scrutinizing the music, and watching for those instances when Bach’s personality seems to penetrate the fabric of his notation. Gardiner’s aim is “to give the reader a sense of inhabiting the same experiences and sensations that Bach might have had in the act of music-making. This, I try to show, can help us arrive at a more human likeness discernible in the closely related processes of composing and performing his music.”
It is very rare that such an accomplished performer of music should also be a considerable writer and thinker about it. John Eliot Gardiner takes us as deeply into Bach’s works and mind as perhaps words can. The result is a unique book about one of the greatest of all creative artists. 

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  • Chapter One 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 Schütz, 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...
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’Opéra de Lyon, the English Baroque Soloists, and the Orchestre Révolutionnaire 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.

Reviews-
  • Kirkus

    Starred review from October 15, 2013
    A celebrated conductor of baroque music debuts with an examination of Bach's compositions, descriptions of various works and some inferences about the genius who created them. Although Gardiner celebrates Bach's accomplishments through this dense, demanding but rewarding work, he reminds readers continually that the composer was no saint--"a thoroughly imperfect being," he calls him near the end. But the author's focus is not so much on the man but on the music. Gardiner does explain the various geographical moves Bach made in his career, his duties in the various venues where he worked, the amazing demands from his employers--and from his own work ethic; the author writes about Bach's coevals, his marriages, and his children and extended family. But all is in service to the principal item on his agenda: the music. Gardiner is an unabashed Bach fan, praising the composer throughout, even comparing his music to the voice of God. However, he recognizes human weaknesses, as well--for example, his contentious relationship with authority. Gardiner takes us through the major types of works--the cantatas (including some interesting passages about the Coffee Cantata), the St. John Passion and St. Matthew Passion, the motets and the Mass in B Minor. Some of his detailed analysis will leave behind his general readers but will surely animate musicians and musicologists. Although he occasionally alludes to extramusical worlds (mentioning Uncle Remus stories, Philip Pullman, Shakespeare, cake-baking and a variety of famous painters), Gardiner's textual world is principally a musical one. He also examines Bach's Lutheranism and how he revealed his religious ideas in the music--and in the interactions between the music and the words. He speculates that near the end of Bach's life, the composer seemed to express some doubts about life beyond the grave. An erudite work resting on prodigious research and experience and deep affection and admiration.

    COPYRIGHT(2013) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  • Library Journal

    June 15, 2013

    Founder of the Monteverdi Choir, renowned conductor Gardiner knows--and loves--his Bach. He's been communing with the great composer since World War II, when one of only two authenticated portraits of Bach hung in his parents' home during World War II for safekeeping. Here he gets inside Bach's music to tell us how it works its magic.

    Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

  • The New York Times

    "[I]t is hard to imagine what the English maestro John Eliot Gardiner. . . might do to surpass Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven 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 Book Review "With Bach we seek the elusive man hiding, perhaps, under the dense, spectacular music. . . .As eloquent a writer as he is a musician, Gardiner brings to his study the invaluable perspective of the practitioner. . . . One of the stars of the revolution over the past 50 years that has brought period instruments into the mainstream of early-music performance. . . . [Gardiner's] depth of knowledge permeates his writing."
  • The Wall Street Journal "Mr. Gardiner writes in the refreshing voice of a man who has studied and performed Bach's music for decades. . . . Like his conducting, the author's writing is lively, argumentative and passionate. He believes deeply in Bach's music and wants to understand each aspect of its construction. . . . Bach's music is one of mankind's greatest achievements, and his genius touches upon matters eternal and profound. His choral music is less well-known than it should be--especially the cantatas, which Gardiner lauds as "gripping musical works of exceptional worth." Spurred by Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven, many listeners will discover them for the first time. In performance and now in print, Mr. Gardiner is Bach's most eloquent champion..."
  • The Daily Beast "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: Music in the Castle of Heaven, a biography 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."
  • The Washington Post "[I]t 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 Christian Science Monitor "Gardiner presents a nuanced account of the constellation of personal, musical, religious, and cultural forces that shaped Bach's astonishing body of compositions. He writes with the care of a scholar, the knowledge of an expert musician, and the passion of a believer (in Bach if nothing else)."
  • Kirkus "An erudite work resting on prodigious research and experience and deep affection and admiration."
  • Simon Rattle, principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic "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."
  • Amanda Foreman, author of A World on Fire "Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven 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."
  • Ian Bostridge "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."
  • Philip Pullman "John Eliot Gardiner's book is, apart from anything else, a tremendous feat of narrative: he has the rare gift of always putting the camera in the right place. He 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."
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