Bach

Music in the Castle of Heaven

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Bach

By: John Eliot Gardiner

Narrated by: Antony Ferguson

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Summary

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.

John Eliot GardinerAntony FergusonAudible Studios

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WARNING! Either this audiobook is being "read" by a machine or somebody at Audible has deliberately chosen an actor who sounds exactly like a machine in order to test whether customers will tolerate a cheap, mechanical reading. There are too many mispronunciations to count: recitative, Webern, elegiac, Emmaus, viola, timbre, concertante, oboe d'amore, Goethe, Montaigne, palliative .... and the voice has no understanding of the subject, of the cultural context or of music. The delivery is SO dull: monotonous, tonally colourless, pedestrian, and unrelentingly harsh. It is as if the voice thoroughly dislikes doing the job, has no enthusiasm for the task, no vocal range. Whoever at Audible allowed this recording to be published should be sacked: it's obvious he didn't bother to listen to it. So many embarrassing mistakes: who is BARK? And one wonders at the mentality of issuing an audiobook about Bach's music but cutting out ALL the musical examples on which the analysis rests. Doesn't Audible understand written music? How Bach works on the ears?

This is a grotesque production because Gardiner's book is one of the most erudite, fascinating, quirky, stimulating, illuminating books about the greatest of all composers. He is no Taruskin but he knows this music so thoroughly from the inside that every page is full of engaging insights and often provocative, only sometimes simply daft reflections. The book should be on every music lover's shelf, every school syllabus. but NOT in the shoddy recording. I hope everyone who buys this volume will demand a refund. If Audible thinks it can get away with robotic readings it will make this the default, money saving option.

“Music in the Castle of Heaven’ will transform the way you think, not only about Bach, but about art and everything it touches. For insight and intelligence, breadth of scholarship – both musical and literary– for passion and intensity, and the ability to communicate complex matters and rich historical detail in everyday language, this book dwarfs every other book on music I’ve read – even Sullivan on Beethoven even, its ground breaking way, the magnificent, magisterial Taruskin.

There’s scarcely a wasted word, a silly speculation. Gardiner is more fully steeped in Bach through his rich experiences of a lifetime’s living and performing the music, and steeped in so much of the other music which helps contextualise it, exploring the cultural territory, struggling with the dirty business of getting the music performed, recorded, justified – a single-minded struggle, rather like Bach’s, or like Christ’s, much like any prophet’s in a sneering and hostile world, in an indifferent, complacent and semi-comatose world, addicted to junk TV and trivial pursuits.

If you have time to read nothing else, treat yourself a couple of hours to lose yourself in the run up to the first performances of the two passions: twin Everest peaks of the mighty sweep of the cantatas and everything else Bach wrote: two towering masterpieces, so different, complementary, twin leaps of faith by Bach- in every sense of that phrase: defying the probability of comprehension by the performers, by the congregation, by the dunder-headed bureaucrats always threatening to scupper the entire, audacious undertaking.

This is the story of the greatest art we have, triumphing over expectations, over probability, over contingencies, over Doubt: another, even more ambitious undertaking than “King Lear” and Hopkins’s sonnets. So far ahead of their times, so unwavering in the belief of what can be achieved through burning faith, unremitting graft, singleness of purpose, blazing determination in the face of the sceptics ...

“Of course, with Faith and hard work, we can walk on water!”

Bach’s achievement is on a different scale, even from Shakespeare’s: even more universal because music is an international language. Currently, the finest performances of these works are by a band of mostly Japanese musicians, steeped, like John Gardiner in England, in the music.

This book is inspirational: we hear, feel, experience Bach’s music lifting off the page as we read, suddenly the whole oeuvre, from the violin partitas to the b minor mass, making far more sense than we’d ever intimated, as we realise what he was up to, the way his mind worked, the breadth of vision, just how much he achieved in that unglamorous career, off the beaten track. A man largely forgotten for the next hundred years.

Bach’s achievements are inspirational for all time because the Christian myth he dramatises probably comes the closest to any universal, unifying conception of reality – cosmic and human – our civilisation is likely to generate, and also because it transcends its own dogmatic particulars in a way nationalist Ring for example can’t even begin to do. We don’t need to share Luther’s particular reading of the story to be inspired by the concept. Only a narcissist will find nothing here to build upon.

It is a self-transcending vision, an attempt to show everything in some kind of intelligible, purposeful liberating, life-affirmative coherence. Bach’s music is so technically masterful, wide ranging, virtuosic, more innovative than anyone’s likely ever to match. As with Shakespeare and the written word, there’s enough here to keep all of us busy for the rest of our working lives, learning from and building with the massive, ingenious Lego system of tonal harmony Bach’s bequeathed us, music at once so technically all embracing and intellectually challenging and yet grounded in, expressive of sensual delight and human passion. Has anyone else plumbed the depths of grief, despair, disintegration so movingly and also taken us to such serene heights? Will there ever be a dramatic experience as devastating as the opening chorus of the St John Passion or one as sublime as the closing pages of the St Matthew? All human experience is there, lies somewhere between those two peaks.

Bach’s is the story of someone almost devoid of vainglory – everything he did was educational, the disinterested pursuit of excellence, leading people to appreciate the glory of Creation and of human creativity. His furious engagements with the sour-voiced idiots who tried to limit what might be achieved was nothing to do with pride or self-promotion. Quite the reverse. If any man dedicated his life to the pursuit of excellence, the search for truth as illuminated by Art for the enrichment of all of us, it was Bach. Although there was more than enough to satisfy them, Bach’s target audience wasn’t the glitterati or the educational elite. It was the ordinary parishioners at their Sunday devotions. Shakespeare’s audience and Dickens’s. Ordinary folk touched by a divine spark.

***