Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

Scarcely ever have I read a work of nonfiction written so passionately as this one. Gardiner's work tells the story of Bach's life (insofar as its events can be discerned) from its beginning through to its end, all the while examining selections from his oeuvre in detail.

The most common criticism of this book I've seen in the press and on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ is that it glosses over most of Bach's instrumental works. This is true. The book focuses almost exclusively on Bach's choral works and particularly focuses on his compositions for the church. However, the treatment of these choral works is positively forensic, and this book serves as just about as comprehensive a guide to them as any non-scholarly reader might ever ask for.

Gardiner is clearly a devotee of Bach's music, and he spells out the meaning behind various pieces extremely vividly. It is often said that the skill of a good teacher lies in making the students interested (in essence, in showing enough passion in the subject to make it come alive), rather than choosing interesting things to teach. In this, I found Gardiner profoundly succesful. I'm not sure that I had ever even thought about Bach's chuch cantatas before reading this book, but by the end I have listened to a great deal of them, and have a list as long as my arm of pieces still to listen to. It's a fascinating and diverse genre that is often overlooked in the twenty-first century.

Sadly, scholars don't know a great deal about the actual details of Bach's life. Where he worked and lived and by which dates he had composed which pieces - these are all things we know more than a little about, but in terms of his character and the day to day details of his life, unfortunately very little is known. Gardiner does an admirable job telling the story with the material available, but this book as a whole is primarily a musical examination of his life, rather than a strictly biographical one.

One of the more unusual anecdotes from the text is included below. Bach, although certainly a brilliant man, was not always a nice one.

We now move forward a few years to an episode in Bach’s first full-time post � to the saga of the recalcitrant bassoon. On one of the few occasions when Bach actually complied with the consistory’s desire for him to compose figural music, he came up with what may have been a first draft of a cantata (BWV 150), or, if not, then something very similar to it, involving a difficult bassoon solo. Setting the music in front of his raw student ensemble, the twenty-year-old Bach had either seriously miscalculated or was being deliberately provocative. His novice bassoonist, three years his senior, was Johann Heinrich Geyersbach. In rehearsal he evidently made a hash of it, and Bach showed his annoyance. As the son of a municipal music director, Bach would have been familiar with the values shared by Saxony’s instrumentalists, who were always told to be wary of Pfuscher (‘bunglers�), Störer (‘troublemakers�) and Stümpler (‘botchers�). If this was the result of having done his best to make music with an unruly lot of what would now be called late-maturing students, it merely confirmed all his misgivings. Geyersbach, for his part, was beleidigt (that superbly expressive German word which signifies both taking offence and feeling hurt), stung by the public dressing down he had received at the hands of a stuck-up young organist, known to be paid exceptionally well for doing remarkably little. The word Stümpler may have crossed Bach’s mind; instead, he called him a Zippel Fagottist. Even in recent biographies this epithet continues to be translated euphemistically as a ‘greenhorn�, a ‘rapscallion� or a ‘nanny-goat bassoonist�, whereas a literal translation suggests something far stronger: Bach had called Geyersbach ‘a prick of a bassoonist�.