Biographers over the past half century have “sanitised” the life of Johann Sebastian Bach, according to a Saturday (9/21) article in the Observer (London). “After years of research, Sir John Eliot Gardiner says biographers have been so ‘overawed’ by the composer that they have presented a misleading image of the man. They have depicted him as a ‘paragon of rectitude, studious and dull.’ … His first school, Eisenach Latin school in Thuringia, Germany, was largely attended by the children of bourgeois tradespeople. However, Gardiner said that documents damn the boys as ‘rowdy, subversive, thuggish, beer- and wine-loving, girl-chasing … breaking windows and brandishing their daggers.’ … Gardiner examined records in three schools Bach attended—Eisenach Latin, Ohrdruf Klosterschule and Michaelisschule, Lüneburg. ‘From the tone of the school reports, it sounds as if the authorities were really worried that the situation had got out of hand. There was something exceptional, certainly in Eisenach.’ … His research will be published by Penguin on 3 October in Music in the Castle of Heaven: A Portrait of Johann Sebastian Bach…. ‘We yearn to know what kind of a person was capable of composing music so complex that it leaves us completely mystified.’ ”
Posted September 23, 2013
