Steven Isserlis - The Bach Cello Suites

Steven Isserlis, The Bach Cello Suites (Faber)

It's sometimes tempting to think that Mozart is the greatest composer, or maybe Handel. Beethoven has his moments and I like to be contrary with my Buxtehude but the answer is really Bach. The piano has possibly the best repertoire and one wouldn't be without the violin but the cello is my favourite instrument.

Among any number of great cellists, it's hardly for me to say who's best but Steven Isserlis is high on the shortlist. In an unguarded moment, perhaps, he found himself saying that the Cello Suites were 'the greatest music ever written'. All of which made this book an essential buy.

One need not worry about it being too technical. Steven is apologetic and not too overlong or academic when he needs to include thoughts on the compositions or how to play them but is, for the most part, light-hearted and jokey while never in any doubt about the awe that Bach and this music make him feel.

As with Shakespeare biography, there's a lot of 'possibly' and 'maybe' in finding the way into Bach's life and the life of his manuscripts although there is no shortage of anecodotes for Steven to base his short biography section on. Then he proceeds through an extensive summary and comparison of the four manuscripts, none of which are Bach's but all of which would have been copied from an original. They don't quite copy them down the same in every detail. 

While the first of his thirteen 'rules for the player' is that there are no rules, he manages to provide twelve more by way of advice and the book , having established that all but the preludes are dance music, he goes to some lengths to find an elaborate religious interpretation for them, too. In another parallel with Shakespeare Studies, the obsession with numerology that Don Paterson set out in his book on the Sonnets, there are highly contrived numbers games going on throughout the Suites that one eventually begins to wonder at. Once one starts on such detective work it is hard to stop, especially with 3, 4, 6, 7 and 12, at the very least, having religious significance and multiplied together can make so many other numbers, too. In not being able to tell if Bach took it so far or if Steven goes beyond what Bach intended, one has to accept that much of it must be valid. With so many layers and the emotional charge contained in the purely mathmmatical content, it's a lot to appreciate in what we first thought was dance music. The verdict is that they aren't studies or exercises but a private meditation. John Eliot Gardiner's book passes over the Suites with only the briefest mention but he is a choral man but exactly why these pieces were written remains one of those mysteries that make them the more interesting.

Best read while listening to the music, the 'companion' finally takes the reader through it movement by movement. Isserlis is unfailingly liberal and non-prescriptive, giving his personal view and accepting that others are available. It's not a long book and it flies by, showing the way to much more than one ever thought. However many times you've heard them, there's always more to be found.