Re-Creating Bach’s Music and Life

The author of this biography, John Eliot Gardiner, is an orchestral and choral conductor who has had many years experience conducting the works of Bach. In the preface to this volume he states, “It is this rich, sonorous world and the delight I take in it, both as a conductor and as a lifelong student of Bach, that I most want to convey.”

Convey it he does, in expressive sonorous prose. The unfolding of the prose has the quality of music throughout. The different periods of Bach’s life—early, middle, and late—are all centered around and expressed in relation to the music he was performing as a keyboard virtuoso, conducting as a cantor or choir director, and composing at the time. All of these activities were usually intertwined in Bach’s everyday life.

This book is a masterpiece and a thing of physical beauty—visually expressive of its subject. One of its many beautiful photographs is of the interior of the cathedral at Eisenach. First Martin Luther and later Bach had active affiliation with this house of worship. There are two impressive portraits of Bach by Elias Gottlob Haussmann, and the reproductions of Bach’s handwritten music manuscript on the inside covers and throughout the volume are beautiful and compelling.

The footnotes are extensive and informative, and the work is further enriched by Gardiner’s wide-ranging familiarity with present-day musical scholarship from which he has abstracted many apt quotations, some of which pertain to such interesting observations as the influence Bach’s music had on later composers—Haydn, Mozart, and Verdi. There are also intriguing and apt comparisons of Bach to writers such as Shakespeare and Dryden, and to painters including Caravaggio, Rembrandt, and Rubens.

Bach, as might not be surprising, was born into a musical family and became a child prodigy at the keyboard. What he learned from his father and older brother was reinforced and extended in the classroom; the ability to play and sing contrapuntally was instilled from an early age. In what was still the Lutheran school system, singing was valued as a proven way of helping pupils commit things to memory.

Although the focus throughout this study is on the kinds of music Bach was writing at different periods of his life and the effect his performance ability and his insistence on performance standards in vocal ensemble had on his compositions, Gardiner does pay due attention to other transformative events in Bach’s life. Many of these are quite sad. Both Bach’s father and older brother died at early ages. Bach himself had seven children by his first wife, and thirteen by his second. A depressing number of them died at early ages such as four and six. The remaining children, however, were musical, and they could quite properly be called a musical family. His two sons, in fact, helped Bach prepare for musical programs by copying the parts for instrumentalists and soloists to use.

It is a privilege to read the biography of a great composer written from the inside out musically rather than from the outside looking in trying to make sense of truly monumental musical compositions. Even though it may be true that the more one knows about music the more this account will resonate, it is even truer that after reading this study the reader will hear more when listening to Bach than he or she ever has before.

For many years during his life Bach was known only as a keyboard virtuoso. But, as Gardiner makes clear, for Bach to perform was for him to improvise on a melodic idea, and it was from these on-the-spot combinations of notes that the incomparable two- and three-part inventions, canons, and fugues arose. It is one of the central revelations of this biography that, for Bach, to perform was to compose. We are all fortunate that he recognized this and took the time and trouble after a performance—no later than...