My latest biography, one of a series of composers I am planning to read in the next few weeks. This one was written by John Gardiner, who is himself a conductor. The book is well written, but heavily focused on an analysis of the music and less on the details of Bach’s life. This appears to be partly because of a paucity of details about his personal life and partly because Bach’s life revolved around his complete immersion in music, both its composition and its performance. So if you read this book, be prepared for a lot of in-depth discussion of music.
Bach was a German at a time of much political and religious turmoil. The German country as we know it today did not exist. He spent much of his adult life in Leipzip, working as a church music leader. Protestantism, as advanced by Martin Luther, was very much the dominant force in much of religious and secular life. His parents died when Bach was quite young, he went to live with an uncle who was the driving force for Bach’s interest in music, for which he obviously had an innate talent. Bach has several siblings who also died in childhood. His first wife died, as did a significant number of Bach’s children. So death and the threat of death was omnipresent to Bach. As he aged, he developed eye and other diseases, but he lived to what then would be a relatively old age.
I was surprised and unaware of the extent to which religion drove Bach’s music. I was also unaware of the complexity of his knowledge regarding the use of voice and multiple instruments in creating the music. He was a conductor as well and an very accomplished keyboard player, so he had a practical understanding of how the music he wrote would sound. At the time Bach was composing there was a still a widespread perspective that music should be used solely for religious purposes, but secular music, particularly opera, had been spreading for some time. Bach toyed with and borrowed from some of the secular music approaches, but he was, partly due to his employment and partly due to his own religious beliefs, almost exclusively focused on composing music to be used at religious services and ceremonies.
Bach was very prolific, and a large number of his compositions are actually lost to us. He was a master of counterpoint and harmonic development. I can only imagine what it must be like to have the musical intuition to understand how combining various tones will sound. He also is praised for his ability to link music to feeling; to have the music itself tell a story, or to support the words being sung. I am slightly skeptical of critics who tell you that a certain piece or portion of music conveys a particular feeling or message, but I do know the some songs or other compositions will move me emotionally.
Bach, as with many geniuses in various fields, did not attain widespread recognition of his accomplishments during his life, and in fact had many conflicts with the church overseers of his work. But he has subsequently been an inspiration not just to other classical music composers, but even to pop musicians in our time. As always it is just fascinating to me to read these stories of people in any area who have great achievements.
