It is not only the depth of John Eliot Gardiner's specialist knowledge and appreciation of Bach that impresses so much but the breadth of his reading in so many other areas like history, economics, astronomy, geography and other composers like Monteverdi, Beethoven, Mozart, Berlioz and, of course, Bach's contemporaries. In most people one might take such polymath expertise as showing off but Gardiner seems to wear it so well that it doesn't look like it.
This is a heavy book not to be undertaken lightly and I was wary not to get involved in long technical analysis of music that is for performers and academics only but the opening chapters are absolutely fine. Gardiner is keen not to make the mistake so often made with Shakespeare that because we admire the work so much we would thus be equally enamoured of the personality. There is no correlation between the two but he pieces together the early bereavements, the truant schoolboy, the Lutheran culture and family circumstances to find the formative influences on an industrious, truculent, devout and demanding professional. The concept of artist or even genius would have meant little to Bach, or at least not in the terms we understand them. Bach's gift, which is in excess of any contempoary musician and arguably any other at all, was much more a result of training and study than innate talent. For him the idea of 'invention'
was the discovery of something that was already there, rather than something truly original - hence his view that anyone could do as well, provided they were as industrious. (* and since I am now so accustomed to footnotes, let's have one here)
Gardiner's consideration of the 'Class of '85', those musicians born in 1685 and just previously, doesn't have Bach foremost among them at the time. They were Domenico Scarlatti, Rameau and Handel, plus Mattheson and Telemann. Bach was not the only one of them to come from a musical family and some of the others were to make their names primarily in opera but while Gardiner is keen to find as human and accurate a portrait of Bach in the evidence, he is rarely prepared to pay anything but the utmost homage to the music.
But this is Gardiner's Bach. Very little space is given to the instrumental music - the violin sonatas, the orchestral suites, The Well-Tempered Klavier or the cello suites, for instance- whereas eventually I had to abandon the lengthy analysis of the cantatas and the choral music. That is, of course, Gardiner's over-riding area of interest and as a 'Portrait of Johann Sebastian Bach' as it claims on the cover, it does become a personal one. In these chapters - and I did get to page 368 before deciding to jump forwards- there is more than a general reader might want of the analysis of key changes, appogiatura, bariolage, cori spezzati and suchlike that I had been dreading. Which will no doubt be of great use to future generations of interpreters but it does make one wonder who the book was written for and Eliot Gardiner, wise man that he is, no doubt did what anybody would do in his position and wrote the book that pleased him.
On broader themes, it is fascinating to see Bach more than once being compared to Beethoven in temperament,
Bach was a natural dissident- almost a proto-Beethovenian rebel avant la lettre
and in the later chapters Gardiner adds to his forensic scrutiny of the portraits some insight into how circumstances made Bach the composer that he became for us, noting how if he had taken posts in Hamburg, Cothen or Dresden rather than Leipzig, he might not have emerged the same due to different prevailing cultural climates.
No, it had to be in that provincial and rather mean-spirited city, inordinately proud of its pure Lutheran Orthodoxy, its distinguished succession of cantors and its sporadic moments of cosmopolitan glory.
And so, if we get a Bach we can identify with, a driven, self-disciplined perfectionist at odds with employers and frustrated at the facilities his employers provide, the sub-standard musicians he has not enough time to rehearse, we possibly even yet don't get the full picture because however wide and impressive Gardiner's learning is, he eventually overdoses us on cantatas and where at first one thought one was going to rush to play them all again and then buy some more, I'm not.
There is just about enough credit given to Mendelssohn for his rediscovery of Bach and there is a superb painting by him that suggests he had talents enough to succeed in whatever discipline he had chosen but in the end one is overwhelmed by Gardiner, and by Bach, but I suspect we might be overwhelmed in a slanted direction when this portrait could have been balanced around a different centre.
I don't think I've listened to any Bach unless it turned up on the radio since I went past about page 250 but when I do it will be The Well-Tempered Klavier.
footnote
* Anti-Stratfordians don't believe that 'Shakespeare' was written by the actor from Stratford because, for one reason at least, he didn't have enough education. That seems to me a bleak view that denies the possibility of innate 'genius'. Bach here argues against 'genius' himself but not that a natural talent cannot be brought to great artistic achievement with tremendous application. And Shakespeare's education would have included a solid basis of Classical literature to which he applied his assiduous interest in the theatre. I had worried that there might be a contradiction between the two but I don't think there is.