Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #216027 in Books
• Published on: 2006-12-04
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 752 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Surprisingly little is known about the domestic and professional life of the man many consider the greatest composer who ever lived, and even this monumental study by a German musicologist has to fall back on a great deal of supposition of the kind all too familiar from some Shakespearean biographies. If it is scant on personal details, it is brilliantly all-encompassing on the music and on the place of Bach in the musical pantheon, both in his own time and in the present. Geck devotes at least two-thirds of his book to an exhaustive examination of Bach's technique and accomplishment in all his major works, and their impact on the listener. This analysis is not overwhelmingly technical and can be readily appreciated by an educated enthusiast. In a final section called "Horizons," in which Geck meditates on Bach's art, religion and philosophy as displayed in the music, he offers some remarkable insights. Bach's "overwhelming density" in places can inspire "shock and awe," as well as "laughter over the infinity of creation, and tears at one's own insignificance." For Bach, he says, "every work of music has to be conceived as a perfect likeness of divine creation." (Dec.)
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From Booklist
*Starred Review* More than a century ago, Albert Schweitzer indicted Bach biographers for a fixation on the composer's technical mastery, contending that such a focus blinded them to his poetic genius. In 2000 a perceptive German musicologist finally published a life study so perceptive and capacious that even Schweitzer would have applauded, and now a gifted translator has made that award-winning biography accessible to English-speaking readers. Writing for both the scholar and the general reader, Geck delivers a portrait of Bach--as man and as musician--more carefully nuanced and complete than those of any of his predecessors. In his portrait of the young Bach, for instance, Geck teases from a mere handful of documents clues as to how a self-taught organ-tuner won exceptional privileges from Arnstadt authorities. And in probing the repeated metamorphoses in Bach's artistic styles, Geck shows how Bach's rare creative talent fused devotion to tradition with experimental daring. The same analytical sophistication reveals how Bach's music reflects a Christian faith inspired by Lutheran mysticism and Pietist devotion. But even as he unveils the origins of Bach's sublime spirituality, Geck reminds readers of the rooted humanity of a boon companion who relished a mug of hard cider. Ordinary lovers of music will join specialists in praising this book. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author
Martin Geck is the author of numerous works on classical music, including a survey of its history from Beethoven to Mahler. He is a professor of musicology at the University of Dortmund in Germany.

Customer Reviews

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

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.

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.