King’s gambit accepted

Although for more than a century Johann Sebastian Bach has been one of the Western world’s most popular classical composers, it is surprising how little those who love his music know about him as a human being — unlike the others at the top of the list, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms or Schubert. Bach’s most recent definitive biographer is the Harvard professor Christoph Wolff, who apologises to his readers on the grounds that Bach’s life ‘lacks exciting dimensions and does not lend itself to a narrative that focuses on and is woven around a chronological list of dates and events’. There are no diaries, very few letters, and a shortage of personal accounts of his contemporaries’ relationships with him. The first book about his life was published more than half a century after he died, written by a musicologist called Johann Nikolaus Forkel, who knew Bach’s sons and whose main objective was to represent Bach as a German national hero. All the subsequent accounts of his life, most of which have also been written by musicologists, have understandably been profoundly influenced by Forkel and are inevitably hagiographic.

The standard view is that Bach’s private life is unimportant, he was a genius who preserved himself by ignoring public approval, he had a difficult, tetchy character, he was a devoted husband and father to his numerous children (several of whom attained public fame in the musical profession), and he had an unquestioning belief in God and his own talents.

In most respects James Gaines agrees with this convention, but contends that we can get a better understanding of his character by exploring the famous occasion when Bach, aged 62, was summoned by Frederick the Great in Potsdam. The book is subtitled ‘Bach meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment’, but it covers much more than this ten-day confrontation in May 1747, devoting most of its space to accounts of the lives of both protagonists.