Bach: A Musical Biography

Peter Williams

Cambridge University Press, £29.99

Review by Brian Morton

IT IS the defining signature of Western music. In German notation, B-A-C-H spells out B? A C B natural. It turns up in the very last pages of The Art of Fugue, that extraordinary musical logarithm that has continued to challenge musicians and musicologists for nearly 300 years. It was first pointed out, while the composer was still alive, by a fellow-organist and composer called Johann Gottfried Walther who said that so many generations of Bachs had been involved in music the name itself was a kind of melody. There are 48 Bachs in the index to Peter Williams’ magisterial biography, ranging from a Hans Bach, a carpenter, fiddler and jester born in Nürtingen in 1555, to Anna Carolina Philippina, the granddaughter of J.S by his fifth child and obituarist Carl Philip Emanuel; she died in 1804.

Johann Sebastian himself lived from the bloody year of 1685, when Europe still had some of the charnel smell of the Thirty Years War about it, to 1750. He comes, then, toward the end of the creative movement known as the Baroque, proving that the greatest artists aren’t necessarily always prime movers and innovators. We know more about him than we know about, say, Shakespeare or Cervantes, but we know remarkably little about his inner, or what might be called his private life. We can infer certain things, and Williams is by no means averse to inferring, when there is evidence to back it up. In later times, using the B-A-C-H motif in a piece of music was usually intended as homage, sometimes direct, sometimes ironic. Shostakovich adapted it to fit his own name D-S-C-H (where Es is E?), but as a cryptogram to conceal a subversive element in work that was supposed to celebrate the Soviet triumph. Bach seems more nakedly self-advertising, also creating a personal crest, too elaborate to write freehand and topped with a crown (as he was entitled to do as the employee of aristocrats and royalty).

The young Bach seems sufficiently sure of himself to jump ship when superior employment beckoned and to write equally elaborate (though not quite literate) justifications for his decision to break or bend contracts. The famous anecdotes about the young composer, particularly the “moonlight” episode where he extracts valuable manuscripts from a music press to copy for his own use, and his nearly 300-mile hike to visit the great Dietrich Buxtehude in Lubeck, are part of a carefully managed legend, intended to reinforce his image as a man consumed by music. There are moments, though, when he can seem consumed by self-regard. Sebastian wasn’t above flyting other musicians, older or younger, but rarely more competent, than himself. He also emerges as a bit of a ruffian, indulging some swordplay in his early years and crossing swords more figuratively with church authorities when he started to decorate his chorales too freely, throwing off congregations who were less interested in aesthetic uplift than in the self-denying glooms instilled by Pietism.

Peter Williams has been writing about Bach since 1970, remarkably, and has not run out of new things to say and new perspectives on the music. He has previously published a 2004 Life of Bach and the excellent 2007 J.S. Bach: A Life in Music. So how does A Musical Biography differ from the latter? The main aim this time is to view the life through the lens of the music, making extensive but careful use of Emanuel’s Obituary as his guide. In musicological terms, it restores the keyboard music to greater emphasis and downgrades the vocal writing a little. Piece by piece, and year by year, it offers the fullest glimpse yet of a man who, musical families on both sides notwithstanding, seems to have had an almost mystical (or mathematical) gift for harmony. “From first to last, but increasingly in the mature work, a few notes are enough for one not only to recognise his hand but to be whisked away into a world that is often not far from a state of hallucination”. Bach’s art is as mysterious as it is precise. Even after viewing him from every conceivable angle for more than 40 years, Peter Williams is still happy to admit that on many points and details, he is still none the wiser. That alone makes this more than a book for specialists. General readers will welcome the glossary and the plain, lucid style, but they shouldn’t be put off reading it. The real subject isn’t a man, but the marvel of music itself.