Music in the Castle of Heaven

Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven by John Eliot Gardiner, 558 pages

 

Johann Sebastian Bach has few peers in the history of music, and all of them seem more interesting on the surface.  When asked the secret of his musical genius, his response was, "I was obliged to be industrious; whoever is equally industrious will succeed equally well."  This has none of the romance of Wagner's egomania, or Beethoven's torment, or Mozart's seemingly effortless prodigality.  They don't make many movies about the thrill of hard work and discipline.  Bach's thorough religiosity, leading to his reputation in Germany as "the Fifth Evangelist", makes his life even more alien to sophisticated audiences.

 

The man revealed in this book is more interesting, and more conflicted, than the popular image of Bach would suggest.  Though Bach held that political authority had a divine origin and must be respected, he also believed in his responsibility to defend his vocation, which in practice meant interminable squabbles with his employers over salary and responsibilities.  Although Bach always conceived himself as laboring "to please God", his genius flowed between secular and sacred, each enriching the other.  Even so, it is not the man who is the main focus of this book, but his works, even if the two can never be wholly separated.  Bach's work remains vital not only because it possesses technical greatness, but equally due to his deep empathy and feel for the human condition as it wrestles with questions of sin, death, and eternity.

 

The author, John Gardiner, is himself a legendary performer of Bach's works, the founder of the Monteverdi Choir and a prime mover in the trend towards the use of period instruments to play Baroque pieces.  Although there are some bits that jar - he subscribes to a theory of religious development which harkens back to Fraser's Golden Bough and Wells' Outline of History filtered through Dawkins and Pullman, and he seems at times to seriously propose the existence of a genetic origin for musical genius - but he is forthright about his own biases - he is interested primarily in Bach's choral works, and spends little time on purely instrumental pieces.

 

Gardiner's description and interpretation of the music of Bach is deep and compelling, even for those of us who have little musical talent.  He teaches us not only the story of how the music was composed, but how it should be heard.