A Portrait of Johann Sebastian Bach by John Eliot Gardiner (3-Jul-2014) Paperback

A serious and extraordinarily thorough book on Bach. Probably of particular interest to performers and anyone with a special interest in the choral music.

I found his comments and background to the St John Passion of great interest.

This is volume written by a master.
Mr. Gardiner makes it clear from the onset that he is an interpreter. This, in contrast to Christoph Wolff's biography (also a fantastic piece). The volume has that point of view which definitely gives it a nice view point.
Word of waring: This is a book for Bach lovers. If you are only a beginer, I suggest you wait a bit before taking the plunge. This is 600 of detailed musical description and analysis.
(other readers agree?)

A comprehensive and highly-readable presentation of the musically rich historical period into which Bach was born and within which he became a premier composer. John Eliot Gardner offers insights from his own distinguished career as an interpreter and conductor, especially of Early Music. Readers with interests in Bach's biography, his self-taught compositional style, relationships with patrons and city councils, and his exceptional performance skills as an instrumentalist and singer will be richly rewarded. There is much to delight church and concert audience members like myself as well as seasoned musical professionals. Numerous illustrations, frequent footnotes, and extensive endnotes stretch a reader's mind and imagination.

This biography will be of interest to those who see Bach as primarily an orchestral and vocal composer. Gardiner is upfront about this–he sees Bach through the lens of his own craft as conductor, and that is both the strength and weakness of this book. On the one hand, this is a deeply probing assessment of the cantatas and the passions; on the other hand, he completely ignores the absolutely critical, transformative musical innovations of Bach that happen not to have occurred in those settings. (His Bach is mostly an early-ish Weimar Bach, with much of the earlier and later work kept off stage.)

To those who know Bach reasonably well, this comes across as bizarre. How on earth can the Well tempered clavier and related issues of tuning, tonality, instrumentation, and so on not be discussed in a major book about Bach? Nor is there any discussion of the Art of the fugue, or fugue in general--Bach's signature musical form--or any of the organ work, the partitas, the suites for keyboard, cello, or violin, etc. etc. It's one thing to choose to emphasize elements that have been neglected; it's another to ignore core features of a composer's accomplishment, which Gardiner unfortunately does. It's like writing a book on Shakespeare and ignoring all of the tragedies, because the author happened to work on the comedies, and wanted to take a "fresh, new perspective."

Moreover, although there are some new details here that have been unearthed since earlier biographies were published, these aren't especially earth shattering (though well worth knowing for serious fans), and the standard lore about Bach is both fairly well known and as well or better treated in other works like Wolff's biography, which I recommend. Finally, Gardiner organizes some of the material in standard linear form, but also includes chapters that are more thematic in nature, like the one dealing with his conflicts with the bureaucracy. This makes things hard to follow sometimes. For example, we leap from Bach's early days straight to the censures he encountered at Leipzig without any explanation of that leap or what happened in between.

Gardiner is a beautiful writer and brilliant musician, so there is lots to learn here, and the assessment of the vocal work is first rate. But most people don't read several long biographies of Bach, and if you only read this one it would, again, be like reading a book on Shakespeare that ignores the tragedies.

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.

Amazing details on the life and works of JSB , reflecting John Eliot Gardiner's deep & thorough understanding of the time period Bach grew up in and what influenced his music and work.
Thank You John Eliot gardiner

Bach has always been my favorite composer and I looked forward to this book. But it was way above my head. In order to understand what the author is talking about you have to be almost as familiar with Bach's choral and religious music as the author. He illustrates his points with details about Bach's works but unless you are very familiar with them, it won't mean much. As the author says, you can't separate Bach's choral music from the words. Conversely the author's words have little meaning unless the music is also available. An audio book with music would have been ideal.
Despite all that, I learned a lot about Bach's life and don't regret buying the book.

My musician friend to whom I gave this literally jumped up and down when he opened the package. He'd read about it and had hinted strongly to his wife about it, but I guess she wasn't getting the message. He was delighted!

This is a huge tome which delves into the minutiae of Bach's music, to the detriment of understanding Bach, the man. Whilst the approach is necessary and justified by the paucity of biographical information regarding JS Bach, I felt that the book could have usefully been condensed to avoid the detail overwhelming the big picture.

To get the most from the book, you'd need to be both a musician and an avid fan of Bach's music. It would also be incredibly useful to have an MP3 player full of all Bach's music that you could refer to in the more turgid passages describing in words what would be more obvious from listening.

All of that said, I still got to the end feeling that I learned something about Bach and his music.

Being an admirer of John Eliot Gardiner's achievements and musical interpretations, my expectations on buying this book were perhaps too high. It is exhaustive, and therefore probably a useful reference work for music students. As a casual reader, however, I gave up less than half way through, having concluded that there is no reason why sublime music should not be composed by a pompous bore.

Massive, Exhaustively Detailed and Also Rather Exhausting

This is a book that is mostly about Bach's sacred music. If you're looking for a neatly chronological book on the life and works of J. S. Bach, then you should probably look elsewhere. You won't be reading about the Well Tempered Klavier, The Brandenburg Concertos or the Musical Offering. John Eliot Gardiner truly loves Bach and is deeply engaged in his approach to vocal and sacred composition. He also really, really KNOWS this music. I felt I was very well acquainted with Bach's sacred music, but this book put me into my rightful place. I applaud Gardiner's attempt to construct a complex picture of Bach based on how processed sacred doctrine through his music.
So why not five stars, when I am, in fact, tempted to give this book 3 stars? In my view Gardiner works way too hard to prove his many, highly detailed and refined points. I felt overwhelmed (and let's admit it, often bored) with the mountain of interpretive detail that Gardiner heaps at the reader. Very rarely do I ever skim a book, but I found myself skimming substantial sections of this book simply because my brain was shouting "Okay, I get it, let's move on with the story." More than anything else, this is a book for a Bach specialist who is intimately engaged in his many cantatas which provide Gardiner with the most substantial records in support of his understanding of how Bach approached and composed sacred music. I was also disappointed that this immense work entirely neglected his secular music, since that too Bach dedicated to God.

Even though John Eliot Gardiner is clearly one of the most knowledgeable authorities on Bach that has ever walked the earth, this book has too many problems to recommend it. I am about halfway through it now, in August, and it was a CHRISTMAS present from my sister that I wanted badly to like. However, it reads to me like "The Sound and the Fury". It is completely unstructured, and jumps back and forth chronologically, suddenly jumps to some other critic who has never been introduced, babbles incoherently, refers to scores that the reader may not know, and is just an ordeal to follow. Also, you will need to have a dictionary with you at all times, because he uses eclectic and esoteric vocabulary words and philosophical and eclesiastical concepts that you will never see again anywhere, and it is not like I am a total dummy- I do have a Ph.D. and have been a lutenist for 45 years. Well, I have not given up yet. I will persevere and try to finish it in another 6 months, and append this review with my final opinion.

Some reviewers would have you believe this book is a bit tedious, a bit difficult, and perhaps a bit boring. Don't you believe it. If you're into Bach's music, you'll have no trouble reading this book. It's enlightening. It's funny. It's a flat-out joy. The author John Eliot Gardiner is among the two or three best conductors in the world today, and an amazing writer. He gets Bach. More importantly, he presents Bach as a three-dimensional, flesh-and-blood character, who happened to be a genius. How did Bach compose such incredible music? What was he like as a man, as a musician, as a composer? The answers are all here.

Bach started out as a church organist. Martin Luther, who lived 200 years before him, had decreed that music was as necessary to spiritual growth as reading the Bible. He saw to it that all the churches in Protestant Germany sang hymns as part of their services. The instrument of choice was the organ. If you were a church elder and had spent all the parishioners' money building an organ that took up an entire wall of your church, you didn't want just anyone playing it. You wanted someone to come in and work out the bugs, to make sure every key, pedal, stop, nob, switch or whatever, worked, and who could make the multitude of brass pipes sing to high heaven. You wanted a virtuoso. You wanted Bach.

In Bach's lifetime, his art at the organ was so great it far exceeded his fame as a composer. It wasn't until years later--long after he was dead and the full extent of his works were finally published--that the world began to realize that this provincial organist was the greatest composer who had ever lived. Indeed, Bach himself never thought of himself as a particularly inspired composer. He put it down to hard work and nothing more.

Bach was born into a musical family. At one point, there were some 20 Bachs playing organ in churches across Germany. An average student, young Johann Sebastian received an unusually thorough humanistic education. As a child, he was a good singer, but it was only in his teens that he developed into a capable instrumentalist, with particular mastery of the violin and keyboard instruments. In composition, he was largely self-taught.

Bach did not consider composing a special talent that only a few possessed, but as something most people could do provided they were industrious and hard working. God was still the only true creator. As Bach saw it, what he was doing was uncovering the possibilities that were already there. Like Shakespeare, he looked for ideas that he could develop, musical ideas, themes (sometimes other people's themes), a line from a hymn perhaps, some scrap of music, something, anything, that he could rework and develop into something exalted and completely his own. His son Emanuel Bach referred to it as a process of inventing, a trigger that fired his imagination and got the creative juices flowing. When he was most under pressure, composing to a tight weekly schedule as with the church cantatas, this process of inventing enabled him to come up with totally original scores in a very short time.

Because his knowledge of harmony was so profound (practically mathematical in effect), he knew how every single note and key related to each other, what could be done with every chord and with every change of direction. As his son Emanuel tells us, "He worked them out completely and dovetailed them into a large and beautiful whole that combined diversity and the greatest simplicity."

The author likens Bach's knack for composing to a game of chess: "Like a chess grand master, Bach is able to predict all the next conceivable moves. One would like to know whether someone so precise and so obviously comfortable with figures and structures was in the habit of applying these faculties to other areas. (Was there some `harmony', for instance, in the way he set out his bills and accounts?) Bach seems to have been unique in identifying the elusive divine spark which for him lay at the core of musical and human experience and which he pursued through hard and arduous work."

The author covers the three main periods of Bach's life: his years in Weimar, where he composed all of his great works for organ; his years in Cothen, where he composed all of his great chamber works; and the last 27 years of his life in Leipzig, where he composed all of his great choral works. He devotes one full chapter to each of Bach's greatest choral pieces: the St. John Passion, the St. Matthew Passion, and the Mass in B Minor. Two of my favorite chapters are "Bach at His Workbench," about Bach the composer, and "Cantata or Coffee" about Bach's years writing secular music for the Collegium Musicum and performing in Leipzig's coffee houses. The author displays a wonderful knack for making this period come alive.

Read this book. Enjoy the journey. If you're like me, you'll wind up listening to all your Bach CDs in succession. Five Stars.

Bach was a masterful composer whose works are technically demanding and incredibly complex. Conductor John Eliot Gardiner, a master musician himself, has spent a lifetime studying Bach and in this book tries to understand the man behind the music. Bach left few writings, but his music is full of joy; Gardiner contends that the music is the key to the real Johann Sebastian.||//Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven// looks particularly at Bach's oral compositions; Gardiner theorizes that the texts chosen represent Bach's own feelings and experiences. For Bach, composing and performing music was a form of worship, and all was done to the glory of God. But he had many textual choices, and a lot of freedom within his employment mandates – so why did he choose certain texts over others? To really understand Bach, Gardiner walks the reader through a history of Bach's Germany, following the events of Bach's life within his surrounding culture. He places compositions in their historical context, and then delves into various pieces in detail, explaining the music theory, the text, the performance. This book beautifully interweaves history, biography, and music theory. It is written with love and admiration, that the author wishes to share with others. It requires time to savor, ideally with some great recordings of Bach's music in the background.
I received a copy from The San Francisco Book Review in exchange for an honest review. The opinions are my own.

This wonderful, erudite, engaging, extraordinary biography has enriched my experience of JSB's music -- in my playing of his works as well as in listening to them. Like some other reviewers, I also went to my own recordings or scores or to youtube performances to understand better -- to discover first hand -- some of Gardner's observations. That's how good this writing is: even at it's most technical, it captures the imagination and compels a desire to learn more -- to see, to hear.

The technical parts are indispensable to this biography. Being tied as they often are in Gardner's writing to JSB's life experience or personality or religious faith, I believe that even without ready access to the music -- or even without much musical knowledge -- they can enable many readers to better know and understand the man, the import of how Bach did what he did for the experience of hearing his music, and most particularly Bach's astonishing accomplishments.

The book also makes Bach human. He is no longer a marble bust. He has personality, sometimes admirable, sometimes not so much, but he was who he was. Gardner doesn't attempt to hide anything, despite his evident respect and even reverence for the man.

Some reviewers wrote that the book is less bio and more about the music, but I would ask, how can the music and the man possibly be separated? As for the extensive descriptions of the settings -- the kind of forested, German Lutheran world that Bach was born into, or who of his most gifted peers was doing what in the musical realm when -- that all lends important dimensions to the story. It helps describe, for example, how it might be that Bach became who he was, and it helps distinguish him from his peers.

The book is engaging and quite readable. Yes, it is full of history and also musical analysis, but at bottom it truly is about Bach the man and not just about his music (choral or otherwise). Though there is indeed a lot of technical discussion about his music, I wouldn't think it insurmountable for those with less technical knowledge, as it is written in a way that one can get the point. There is much else: an extensive and intriguing description, for example, of how Bach is thought to have approached composing music (and the evidence for such suppositions). In other words, there's something precious here for just about anyone who loves classical music and who wants to get to know this guy Bach and his work.

This is a superb book, but I advise against reading it on the Kindle (which is how I read it). It's a book where you naturally want to keep flipping back and forth (partly to follow the cross-references, but also because you want to re-read passages, or read them along with a recording of the music). The illustrations in the Kindle edition are all out of sequence and very hard to make out. Worst of all, the index is useless and this is a book in which the index is of paramount importance, particularly if you want to go back later and pay more attention to one of the cantata analyses. (I have an older Kindle, so maybe some of this isn't as much of a problem in the later versions, but even so, I believe this is a book you want to hold in your hands.)

After a promising introduction, the book becomes so long-winded and tedious with so much blabla not at all relevant to Bach and his music that I stopped reading. To me it seems that Bach is merely the pretext here for the self-aggrandizement of the author. That is very regrettable. Had he better not written but only conducted!

I learned things in reading this biography, but the author assumes that the reader knows the works of Bach very well. At times, I wished that the biography had spared me some of the technical details or history of the period and offered more humanizing stories from the life of J.S. Bach.

What a brilliant book. A first-time biographer, conductor Gardiner writes powerfully and entertainingly about the elusive Bach. Further, he really colors his world, bringing his Thuringia to vivid life. I recommend listening to Bach while reading. Gardiner's astonishing virtuosity as a musician and historian bring the listener to new understanding of this complex, extraordinary composer.

Gardiner's chorale direction and literary skill are combined to humanize a genius. Bach's humanity (as described in the New Yorker review) takes nothing away from his "divine imagination." I have given the book to my son who, as a child, taught himself to read music in order to play Bach on keyboards. I wish that my late friend, Ralph Kirkpatrick, could have lived to read this book and cherish even more the composer whose works he and his harpsichord brought to wider audiences.

As a writer, Mr Gardiner is a great conductor. When I got his book as a Christmas gift, I was very excited, since I've been a great fan of his as a musician. But I was utterly disappointed. The book is extremely boring, with too many footnotes, most of them absolutely useless. The narrative is confusing, and Bach - the man - is never present.