Daisy’s Reviews > Music in the Castle of Heaven: A Portrait of Johann Sebastian Bach > Status Update

This, Laurence Dreyfus suggests, ‘can only be good, since it allows us to take those inchoate feelings of awe which many of us feel upon hearing Bach’s works and transform them into a vision of the composer’s courage and daring, thus letting us experience the music anew … Bach and his subversive activities might provide the key to his achievement, which, like all great art, is attuned to the most subtle manipulations and recasting of human experience.’

This feels like a hot take compared to how I've always heard Bach being spoken of and of what I know about him.
I've always viewed him more as a composer that took to its absolute limits, existing musical traditions and had an obsession with cataloguing for us the greatest examples of every genre which we now view as the quintessence of the late Baroque.

I highlighted this exactly because I found it interesting, and slightly odd ( maybe less odd given the context of the quote in the book haha, Gardiner tries to get us to look at Bach as a flawed , real human being instead of a godlike figure , or “bewigged, jowly old German Capellmeister” ). Still, I find the word “rebel” slightly puzzling, at least musically- I also tend to view him as a synopsizer of different styles ( as Greenberg suggests) rather than a daring innovator? But then again I know so little.
Also I think Gardiner is going to focus more on the vocal works, especially the cantatas. Vocal works are generally difficult for me, maybe this will be the book that gets me to properly appreciate those cantatas! 🤞😁 I do also want to read Christoph Wolff’s book!

Daisy wrote: "I highlighted this exactly because I found it interesting, and slightly odd ( maybe less odd given the context of the quote in the book haha, Gardiner tries to get us to look at Bach as a flawed , ..."

I don't know about you but I struggle not to regard Bach (and Beethoven too, while we're at) as godlike figures with at least some sort of divine qualities 😁
Yeah, Gardiner is nuts about the cantatas! He toured them with the Monteverdi choir; I watched some Youtube doco about it ages ago. I was, and am to a degree still, similar to you with vocal works in Classical music; they have been the thing that has come less naturally to me. The earliest things that changed my mind were the Requiems (I don't know what this says about me) of Mozart, Brahms, Berlioz and Faure as well as Beethoven's brilliant Missa Solemnis, although I do get a bit of "upper-register fatigue" listening to it by the end.
The cantatas, there are just soooo many! I can listen to one randomly and really enjoy it but stringing them together it just becomes background noise, which feels blasphemous to say!
I really enjoyed Wolff's book because, at the time, I knew next to nothing about Bach but it is heavy on minutiae that can become a bit tiresome at times. It's also dense with... You guessed it, cantatas, which I think is just an inevitability in a Bach bio. Enjoy and/or best of luck! 😁

Oh interesting! I definitely consider the music from both composers have that divine quality but I have never considered the people behind the music to be god-like for some reason. When I first got into classical music, I watched the film The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach in which quite a bit of emphasis was placed on the worldly concerns and struggles of Bach, maybe that kind of made me more inclined to compartmentalize the music genius of theirs? I feel that something in them allowed them to reach the sublimity musically or compositionally, but i don’t necessarily think that they, as people, had that divine quality?
I love the requiems! I love a lot of operas too and lied, my issue is I suspect I have very limited brain power at any given time. For instance, with opera, i can’t watch a production while fully appropriate the music - it’s just too much information. Everything sounds so much better when I don’t have the visuals and the words to “distract “ me but then I have no idea what is going on 😅 yeah, vocal music doesn’t come naturally to me either . The words are pretty essential in J.S. Bach's cantatas, so I am thinking when I get there, I will just focus on two or three and try to understand how the words interact with the music … and thanks Jonathan i will definitely be needing the luck haha 😁