Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven by John Eliot Gardiner (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven by John Eliot Gardiner Eric C. Simpson (bio) John Eliot Gardiner, Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven (Knopf, 2013), 672 pp. The Bach story that has been handed down to us is decidedly less romantic than that of the three Vienna greats. The Baroque master did not, like Beethoven, suffer from worsening deafness that led him to contemplate suicide. He did not experience Mozart’s meteoric rise and sudden, untimely death. And unlike Schubert, he did not die young, penniless, and unappreciated by all but those at his bedside, only to be rediscovered decades later by the greatest minds in music. Johann Sebastian Bach worked hard, provided for his family, and achieved modest fame during his lifetime. Compared to that of the prototypical struggling composer, Bach’s life was, in a word, “unsexy.” In his new biography of the composer, Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven, John Eliot Gardiner seeks to penetrate the conventional Bach myth and reveal a more complete, more human vision of the most admired musician of the Baroque era. Bach’s life, Gardiner argues, was not the straightforward life of the archetypical diligent German protestant, a hard-working, pious family man whose art exists on a plane separate from and above its creator. He was a human being, and a flawed one, but it is the very fact of Bach’s humanity, and its presence in his work, that makes the music we have come to cherish so astounding. “Acknowledging his imperfections,” Gardiner argues, “allows us to see his humanity filtering through into the music, which is far more compelling when we understand that it was composed by someone who, [End Page 591] like all human beings, experienced grief, anger, and doubt at first hand.” This is a worthwhile discussion, but in looking to Wagner’s bigotry and Mozart’s juvenility for comparisons, he stretches the point. The most Gardiner comes up with is an “exceptional pettiness in his daily social and professional relations whenever he felt unjustly treated” and a “tendency to be irascible and prickly whenever he felt his own authority as musician and chosen servant of the Lord was being challenged.” To be sure, Bach often shot himself in the foot in his personal and professional life, as Gardiner amply catalogues in a lifetime of social faux pas. But these episodes hardly bring us closer to understanding the man’s art. Musical biography tends to be the domain of musicologists and music historians; Gardiner has considerable chops in these two departments, but he is primarily a performer, and brings an artist’s perspective to his writing. While he sputters in his quest to find the composer’s “dark side,” Gardiner’s exploration of the music itself is the most compelling and revealing part of his argument. Bach was born in Thuringia just decades after the region suffered unspeakable devastation in the Thirty Years’ War. Orphaned as an adolescent, widowed once, and forced to bury eleven of his twenty children, Bach dealt with loss throughout his life. This “cumulative grief,” Gardiner argues, must have manifested itself somehow, but unlike others of our great composers, Bach did not leave behind an enlightening or thrilling correspondence. We have little to go on as far as how Bach dealt with hardship in his private life; we must turn to his “public expressions of grief and his poignant responses to funerary texts, both in his cantatas and motets.” It is in this close reading of the composer’s work, in mining the art to find the truth of the artist, that Gardiner’s Bach shines. As a conductor, Gardiner has made Bach’s music the center of his professional life, and all of the knowledge and care that come with that experience are visible in his absolutely stunning musical exegeses. Take, for instance, his analysis of a passage from the “Confiteor” section of the Mass in B Minor: Doubt has suddenly been cast over the very possibility of our sins being remitted. The words change to “and I hope for the resurrection of the dead,” but the music seems anything but optimistic. With the apparent crumbling of...