The second area which I found very useful to explore was his own annotations and comments that he introduced in his copy of Abraham Calov's Bible commentary - Calov being a 17th-century theologian - a book in Bach's private library which Bach annotates very carefully and very meticulously and things that draw his eye like, for example, how to deal with the concept of anger and that Calov makes it clear that you can be, you must turn the other cheek if somebody is being angry about you or if you feel angry in response to a personal slight. Number one is the contextual information that you can gain from the sources, from the local, parochial sources about conditions in Germany at the time of Bach's birth, conditions pertaining to the schools that he went to, conditions pertaining to the whole difficult social life of Germany recovering from the 30 Years War and on the brink of enlightenment but still hanging on to a pre-Galileo view of the world - very medieval in a way - and not allowing yet the full flood of enlightenment thought to change their weltanschauung.

But I think basically there are three elements that you have to draw on. Well, with great difficulty and that was a big challenge. How do you try to crack that nut in your new book? In your book, you're saying Bach's music is well-known, but we end up knowing very little in comparison about Bach the man. From his childhood interactions with Bach, Gardiner would grow up to become one of the composer's greatest champions, creating his own orchestras ( English Baroque Soloists and Orchestre Révolutionaire et Romantique) and choir (Monteverdi Choir) to play the music in historically informed performances.

It's a scene Gardiner sets at the beginning of his new book, BACH: Music in the Castle of Heaven, published today by Knopf. Each week the musically inclined family gathered for serious singalongs, which included Bach's motets. Bach's music also hung in the air of the Gardiner home. It was one of only two fully authenticated portraits of Bach by Elias Gottlob Haussmann, painted around 1750, and came to the Gardiner home in a knapsack, delivered on bicycle by a Silesian refugee who needed to keep it safe during World War II. On his way to bed, he couldn't help glancing up at the famous 18th-century portrait of Bach that hung in the first floor landing of the old mill house in Dorset, England where Gardiner was born. Johann Sebastian Bach has been a central figure in the life of British conductor John Eliot Gardiner since he was a youngster. This rare portrait of Bach, by Elias Gottlob Haussmann, hung in John Eliot Gardiner's home during World War II.Ĭourtesy of William H.

Bach cantata gardiner