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Music in the Castle of Heaven A Portrait of Johann Sebastian Bach

Illuminating though the historical sections are, the book moves onto an entirely new level when the author writes out of his knowledge and experience of the Bach music he has conducted to such great acclaim

AT THE Weimar court chapel on Sundays in 1708, the music seemed to float down from Heaven. It came from an opening in the ceiling, high above the nave. Crowded together up there beneath the roof, the singers, organist and other musicians performed out of sight of the worshippers three storeys below.

The chapel was called the Castle of Heaven — Himmelsburg; in that cramped loft Johann Sebastian Bach served for a decade as the brilliant young chief organist and directed his early church cantatas.

The image of the great composer in that elevated gallery, already giving forth the music of the angels, has provided John Eliot Gardiner with a title worthy of his subject, and of the music that Bach inscribed ‘SDG’ (Soli Deo Gloria — To the Glory of God Alone).

Splendid though it is, however, the title doesn’t quite do justice to Gardiner’s achievement in this wonderful book. He has not set out to find new words to describe Bach’s ‘divine’ genius; his concern rather is to relate the genius of the music to our scant and often troubling knowledge of the man who composed it.

The title echoes that of James R Gaines’s book about Bach and Frederick the Great, Evening in the Palace of Reason — a fascinating account of the composer’s achievement in the intellectual context of Germany in the early 18th century. Gaines, like previous writers, left us with the Bach we can discern from contemporary sources. A character, to use Gardiner’s summation, “all too obviously flawed, disappointingly ordinary and practically invisible to us”.

Gardiner does return to the known facts, and with some interesting results — but in his quest for Bach the man his main focus is on the music, the character details it can suggest and the extra dimension it can bring to our knowledge of the Cantor of Leipzig.

He proves uniquely suited to the task — and not only because as a conductor he is one of the world’s most eminent interpreters of Bach’s music. His extensive footnotes and scholarly references remind us that his Cambridge degree was not in music, but in history. And another thing: he is a farmer.

Farming the family acres in Dorset might seem to have as little to do with music as it does with musical biography. But when Gardiner gleefully refers to successive generations of the Bach family musically ‘breeding up’ (by marrying into other families of gifted musicians) he is leading us away from an excess of reverence which can too easily diminish the music.

When he describes his experience of conducting the complete cycles of nearly 200 church cantatas in a single year (2000), in performances that followed the church calendar as Bach intended, the author relates them — as a farmer must — to the cycle of the agriculture seasons. That in turn evokes pre-Christian rituals and other forgotten connections, and the underlying round of life and death with which the cantatas are so closely concerned. The effect is to send us back to those glorious works with an appreciation that can soar all the higher for having been brought down to earth.

If Gardiner the farmer brings an earthy wisdom to his portrait of the great Cantor, Gardiner the historian is equally disinclined to idealise his subject. The extended family of musicians in which Bach grew up is characterised as no company of saints, but as a network of musicians whose success was hard-earned and jealously guarded.

The harsh reality of Bach’s schooldays is examined, with startling results. There were serious disciplinary problems, well documented: rowdyism and cruelty. We cannot know whether Bach was a victim or a perpetrator (or both), but must we assume he was a paragon? Gardiner concludes that there is sufficient circumstantial evidence to dent the image of Bach as an exemplary youth. “It is just as credible,” he writes, “that the bewigged cantor-to-be was third in a line of delinquent school prefects — a reformed teenage thug.”

Bach’s idolaters, reeling from that bombshell, will find a few more myths shattered here, including the one promulgated by the composer, of himself as a self-taught musician. Gardiner is in no doubt about the roles of several important teachers who must be given their due — in particular Bach’s eldest brother, Christoph (who took him in when he was orphaned at the age of nine), his father’s very gifted first cousin, also called Christoph, and the organist and composer Georg Böhm.

Illuminating though the historical sections are, the book moves onto an entirely new level when the author/conductor writes out of his knowledge and experience of the Bach music he has conducted to such great acclaim: the great settings of sacred texts.

Searching for the human composer in the cantatas, motets, oratorios, Masses and passions, he gives us a dazzling sequence of chapters to which we will return again and again: discussions of individual works that drive us to seek out unfamiliar pieces and listen again to those we thought we knew.

Like a conductor in rehearsal, Gardiner moves between points of detail and matters more profound: from noting how a violin passage in the St Matthew Passion seems to trace the motion of Judas’s wrist as he flings down the coins on the Temple floor (“thirty notes for thirty pieces of silver”) to the silence at a key point in the B minor Mass which “encapsulates the supreme mystery of Bach’s music — pregnant with a sense both of anticipation and of lost innocence, like a childhood faculty miraculously restored”.

Throughout — though never overstated — runs the experience of that Bach Cantata Pilgrimage of 13 years ago. For a whole year the conductor subjected himself and his singers and players to a workload as demanding as that with which Bach and his Leipzig forces struggled: never enough rehearsal time, never a second chance to get the performance right before moving on to the next week’s music (and the next week’s set of conflicts over money, contracts, conditions, etc).

Gardiner clearly emerged from the BCP (as he calls it) having developed a deep imaginative engagement with the composer — a sense of knowing the man whose performances he was recreating. The communication of that engagement is the book’s most thrilling achievement.

The less endearing aspects of Bach’s character are still there: the “tetchiness, contrariness and self-importance, timidity in meeting intellectual challenges, and a fawning attitude towards royal personages and to authority in general which mixes suspicion with gain-seeking”.

All is changed, however: those qualities, which were shocking when ascribed to the quasi-divine idealised composer figure, are more easily subsumed into our sense of his humanity. We can overlook the faults of those we care about — and John Eliot Gardiner has given us a Johann Sebastian Bach whom we can love.

How then are we to relate the human Bach to his apparently supernatural achievement? In summing up, Gardiner defines that achievement in terms of giving us “the voice of God — in human form”. As Pablo Casals put it, “to make divine things human and human things divine”.

Like the courtiers in the nave of the Himmelsburg we hear Bach’s music as coming to us from above; like children in adult company we are listening to a discourse that goes over our heads.

This book reminds us of the human thread that runs through that awesome discourse, which enables us to grasp at a meaning true to our deepest intuitions. Straining to put that meaning into words, we find ourselves using the language we have learned from the believers: we talk of the music of paradise.

And for those who would rather relate to the greatness of the music without invoking a divinity, there is help from the atheist composer György Kurtág, speaking of Bach’s religious belief: “My brain rejects it all. But my brain isn’t worth much.”