Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven

One of the Best Books of the Year
* The Economist * The Christian Science Monitor * Financial Times *

Johann Sebastian Bach is one of the most unfathomable composers in the history of music. How can such sublime work have been produced by a man who seems so ordinary, so opaque—and occasionally so intemperate?

John Eliot Gardiner grew up passing one of the only two authentic portraits of Bach every day on the stairs of his parents’ house, where it hung for safety during World War II. He has been studying and performing Bach ever since, and is now regarded as one of the composer’s greatest living interpreters. The fruits of this lifetime’s immersion are distilled in this remarkable book, grounded in the most recent Bach scholarship but moving far beyond it, and explaining in wonderful detail the ideas on which Bach drew, how he worked, how his music is constructed, how it achieves its effects—and what it can tell us about Bach the man.

• Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician
• Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph
• The New Bach Reader: A Life of Johann Sebastian Bach in Letters and Documents
• Johannes Brahms: A Biography
• The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven (Expanded Edition)
• Evening in the Palace of Reason: Bach Meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment (P.S.)
• Bach Cantatas (Box Set)
• Debussy: A Painter in Sound
• The Cello Suites: J. S. Bach, Pablo Casals, and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece
• The Indispensable Composers: A Personal Guide