Jonathan Keates

Bach’s life examined

Music all too easily disarms our critical faculties.

issue 31 October 2009

Music all too easily disarms our critical faculties. Composers need protection from those grovelling adorers who refuse to distinguish good from bad in their idol’s oeuvre or even to acknowledge his occasional lapses into doodling and bombast. The fawning which began during Wagner’s lifetime for example, scarcely discouraged by the cult object himself, has since become a veritable psychosis, divorced from any worthwhile musical or aesthetic criteria. Schubert has likewise suffered from the dim religious light cast over his achievement by drooling worshippers, too ready to ignore the inconsistencies of his wayward talent or its periodic lapses into twaddling prolixity.

The most eminent casualty of this unhealthy obsession with turning classical masters into plaster saints is Johann Sebastian Bach. In the introduction to his excellent new biography of the composer, Julian Shuckburgh quotes John Eliot Gardiner’s judgment that

Bach is probably the only composer whose musical output is so rich, so challenging to the performer and so spiritually uplifting to performer and listener alike that one would gladly spend a year in his exclusive company.

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