Johann Sebastian Bach: Life and Work
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Description
Two hundred and fifty years after his death, Johann Sebastian Bach remains one of the most compelling figures in the history of classical music. In this major study of the composer's life and work, Martin Geck follows the course of Bach's career in rich detail--from his humble beginnings as an organ tuner and self-taught court musician to his role as Kapellmeister and cantor of St. Thomas's Church in Leipzig. Geck explores Bach's relations with the German aristocracy, his position with regard to the Church and contemporary theological debates, his perfectionism, and his role as the devoted head of a large family.
The focus in this comprehensive, thoroughly researched book is on the extraordinary work that came of the composer's life. From the Goldberg Variations to the Brandenburg Concertos to the Art of the Fugue, Geck carefully analyzes Bach's innovations in harmony and counterpoint, placing them in the context of European musical and social history. Always fresh and stimulating, this definitive work reintroduces Bach's enormous oeuvre in all its splendor.
Customer Reviews
AN EXCELLENT SURVEY OF BACH'S LIFE AND WORK
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) is given an expansive and detailed treatment in Geck's 2000 book. It is filled with details, ranging from the minor (e.g., according to a cousin of his, Bach "has a taste for hard cider and 'yeast brandy'") to the major ("The Lutheran faith is of the utmost significance for Bach's creative work").
Bach was unappreciated, and "Few of Bach's works appeared in print during his lifetime." Geck sheds some signficant insight as to why Bach was only given the position as Cantor of the Thomaskirche at Leipzig after it had first been offered to Telemann, Graupner, and Fasch (and turned down): "he does not come from Leipzig and, unlike the others, has no university training. What matters here is Bach's own plan for his life: although he chooses advanced schooling and an education over an apprenticeship, thereby keeping important doors open, he is, to a much greater degree than the three other kapellmeisters, a self-made man, one who set his sights high early on and is willing to work hard to achieve his goal. This ethos grows out of the craftsman's approach and will inform that of the educated artist."
Still, as a court musician in the chapel of Duke Johann Ernst in Weimar, "When Bach performed his music for religious services at court, he could count on an alert and knowledgeable audience---rather than narrow-minded, frivolous aristocrats interested only in hunting." Yet later on he fell out of favor, and was actually imprisoned for a month, composing "The Well-Tempered Clavier" in "a place where dismay, boredom, and the lack of any sort of musical instrument made this way of passing the time essential."
Geck notes that Bach's later position as Cantor of St. Thomas' Lutheran Church obliged him to perform the teaching of a number of academic subjects (e.g., Latin, grammar)---which he could pay someone else to do for him---but "Buying his way out of teaching the academic subjects does not free the cantor of his responsibility for teaching music classes, giving individual lessons, or meeting his many other pedagogical obligations at this school with fifty-five boarding students."
Geck argues that "The Bach of the last phase (of Leipzig) is no old man gathering his waning strength to bring in a last harvest." "As we can recognize today, with the premiere of the (St. Matthew Passion) on 11 APril 1727, the great period in which Bach concentrated on composing Lutheran church music comes to an end." Concerning Bach's being a Lutheran and yet composing his famous B Minor Mass, Geck suggests that "He is not cozying up to Catholicism. The term 'Catholic mass' should be understood ecumenically..."
Was Bach a "conservative" composer? Geck responds that "there may be musical standards that, once he established them, became a Rubicon he did not want to cross again." He also makes the significant observation, "Insisting that Bach was unappreciated during his lifetime has become part of the Bach hagiography." Nevertheless "More than once he was deemed to be one fo the most important composers of his time."
This is an excellent study of the man, and his music. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!
2009-09-25
(Sacramento, CA USA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5
BACH NO HUMANIST
This book, like most written about J. S. Bach within the last hundred years, paints a man who wrote "J. J." at the top of his compositions as a humanist! (The two "Js" stand for "Jesu Juva," a Latin inscription meaning, "Jesus, Help Me." These same manuscripts were ended with S.D.G. = Soli Deo Gloria or, To God, Alone the Glory.)
Men like Geck, with long strings of letters after their names, rush to derail the abundant and irrefutable proofs that J. S. Bach was a devout, believing and practicing CHRISTIAN, and they misrepresent him as a humanist. Some books, like this one are downright silly in proposing that a man who set to music more than five hundred deeply spiritual and Christ-centered cantata texts, did so while not believing a word of what he set. To accept the Bach as a humanist would mean that on every Sunday (except during Lent) and on all the major Feast Days, from 1723 to 1750, Bach's choirs sang a lie and he directed those lies.
Bach never wrote words himself, or set to music words of anyone else who believed or espoused the Humanists mantra: That mankind's strength comes "from within." Read the words to the recitative for bass in the Christmas Oratorio that state: "My Jesus, when I die, I shall not die eterally. Thy name upon me Thou dost write, which puts the fear of death to flight!" No one, who reads the texts to Bach's Pentecost cantatas can come away with any doubt that the composer truly believed in an in-dwelling Holy Spirit and in the life-changing qualities of that infusion of God's power.
To the unbeliever, these words are suffocating and seem excessive. But further familiarization with the texts Bach chose, reveal other, innumerable instances of just what he believed. Bach did not believe, as humanists would propose, that man is basically good. Bach did not believe that man can improve himself by merely being kind to others and by drawing upon some mysterious, self-contained strength.
To confirm this, read the margin notes he wrote in his Calov Bible. The book is in the library of Concordia College in Missouri, USA. The "New Bach Reader" contains all these notes with very clear explanations of them.
Further, Geck's book indicates that Bach was a pietist. This is clearly WRONG. Bach put up with a pietist rector in Muehlhausen and stomached the incursion and growing popularity of pietism, but he was an ORTHODOX LUTHERAN and he retained and practiced all the elements of that strong faith, inculcated in him and his father, Ambrosius, all his uncles and ancestors, going back to the earliest known ancestor, Lips Bach!
J.S. Bach set to music and wrote in his second wife's "Notenbuch," arias, recitatives, chorales and choruses that support the teachings of Martin Luther: That man's salvation comes only through the grace of God, as a gift. It cannot be "earned" or "bought" as the Roman church had taught. He believed, as Luther did, "By Adam's fall, we sinned, all." Further, as Luther knew, Bach knew that good works are not the recipe for eternal life.
Humanists believe doing good is what makes a person better. Luther (,St. Paul) and Bach believed people are worms to start with and that once you had accepted Christ's gift of salvation, one would WANT to do "good" in order to serve their new Lord and his creation. Geck apparently does not share or understand this, so he (and others) attempt to ignore or twist Bach's Orthodox Lutheran beliefs to suit the revisionist and humanist view of what the sermons and cantata texts in the Thomaskirche stated clearly.
This is a long treatise on Bach's beliefs, but a full explanation is required to point out how misguided and uninformed Geck and the others are, when they minimize, debunk or distort Bach's beliefs and replace them with what most of "academe" thinks is a smarter and better-informed interpretation of them.
The book does reveal Geck's sometimes extravagant conjectures about known happenings in Bach's life, but I could not discover anything new and useful. Instead, I found a tiresome re-hashing of popular fable and baseless and untruthful revisions in what Forkel and Spitta wrote about when it came to the great Sebastian's beliefs.
Michael Lonneke
Round Hill, VA
2008-02-13
(Virginia USA) | Helpful Votes: 9 | Rating: 2
Some interesting content, annoyingly disturbing translation
This book is a strange combination of some interesting content (especially the part about the works; the biographical information is dry and gives no idea what kind of a person Bach was), and some very misguided choices in translation. Aside from the occasional translation error, the translator seems not to realize that the "historical present", which is used in German, does not exist in English (other than rarely). This gives, as another reviewer pointed out a sensation of cognitive dissonance. As I translator myself, I'm used to seeing this is French (the language I work from), but when I read a French book using this, it is rarely as disturbing as it is here. The translator should have normalized this into English, that is, using the past, but also should have normalized the disturbing shifts of time from the past to the present that occur on nearly every page.
The biographical section is, as I mentioned, dry and static; you get no feeling that Bach ever ate a meal or went to the bathroom. It is fact after fact, date after date, written document after written document. The parts about the music itself are more interesting, but the overall feeling this book leaves is one of confusion. The decision to separate Bach's life and work is curious; the two were intertwined (especially because the author talks so little about Bach as a person, there's nothing else to hold up to the light).
All in all, this is not a good book for someone wanting to understand Bach's life. Alas, in spite of the many books about Bach, not many of them do so. Others are also plagued by translation errors, or academic prose, and a real humanist biography of Bach is needed.
2007-11-26
| Mac author and journalist and French-English translator (A village in the French Alps) | Helpful Votes: 5 | Rating: 3
Temporal schizophrenia?
Other reviewers (three at the time of writing) have adequately addressed the scholarly content of this book, so I shall confine myself to a stylistic problem that none of them mentions. Perhaps it didn't disturb them? It certainly did me; in fact, it drove me crazy.
And that is (if you will forgive me), that the author cannot make up his mind whether he spoke of Bach in the past or the present tense. For instance, on p. 38 we have:
`Eisenach not only provides his musical world but is also the site of his upbringing and education' (etc.)
But then:
`The hymnal, the catechism, Latin texts -- these elements dominated the early education of young Bach.'
Again:
`At all events, he sets out on foot in March 1700 for Lüneburg, to arrive there before Easter. His classmate at the Ohrdruf lyceum, Georg Erdmann, released from school several weeks earlier, may have accompanied him.'
These examples, perhaps not particularly egregious, are merely chosen at random from those that pervade the book.
German is sufficiently like English, that it seems safe to assume that this is a characteristic of the original, and not of the translation (especially since we're told that the translation is `skillful'). It would be interesting to know for sure; I looked at Amazon Germany's website, but Search Inside was not enabled.
Sad to say, the mannerism also affects the analysis portion of the book, contaminating not only syntax but semantics. On p.355 we read:
`Bach continues his experimenting. For the very next Sunday, the fourteenth Trinity Sunday, he writes an opening chorus for the cantata BWV 25...'
Since we have by now grasped the fact that Bach is dead, we can safely assign this event to the past. But then we have:
`Taking a broad view of Bach's music, the musicologist Gerd Rienäcker speaks of a "consciousness of catastrophe," located in Luther's theology but...' (etc.)
Is Rienäcker a denizen of the 18th century, or the 20th? Or is it the 19th? We have no easy way of telling.
I personally find all this, as Caligula supposedly found Gemellus's cough, very irritating. While I would not go so far as to suggest Caligula's remedy, I would certainly hope that enough people will expostulate with the author and/or publisher that it will be corrected in future editions.
The rating is a compromise between five stars for content and two for style. If you're a music student, this review probably won't -- and shouldn't -- affect your purchasing decision; but if you read merely for pleasure, you may want to take note.
2007-03-15
(Campbell, CA USA) | Helpful Votes: 6 | Rating: 3
A Biography and A Musical Analysis
It's strange that with someone as famous as Bach that we really know very little about his personal life. In this book Martin Geck has written as much as we know, and has had to expand that with some of the generally accepted rumors. He has done a very good job in this area. That takes about a third of this book.
The other two thirds of the book is on Bach's music. In this area, the book is absolutely supurb. Mr. Geck has been a professor of musicology at Dormund University. He has written about the other German major composers and now has produced this masterpiece on Bach.
He covers every aspect of Bach's music from technique, to the impact on the listener. Surprisingly his analysis is not too technical so the average enthusiast can understant what he is saying. The last section of the book is called Horizons, and while fairly short (30 pages or so) he offers some opinions on Back's art, theology, symbolism and other aspects of his work that are seldom covered.
2007-02-19
| Gunny (Winnemucca, NV) | Helpful Votes: 7 | Rating: 5
