Synopses & Reviews
One of the Best Books of the Year
* The Economist * The Christian Science Monitor * Financial Times *
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
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 day 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.
About the Author
John Eliot Gardiner is one of the world’s leading conductors, not only of Baroque music but across the whole repertoire. He founded the Monteverdi Choir and Orchestra, the Orchestre de l’Opéra de Lyon, the English Baroque Soloists, and the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique. He has conducted most of the world’s great orchestras and in many of the leading opera houses. He lives and farms in Dorset, England.