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Bach  By  cover art

Bach

By: John Eliot Gardiner
Narrated by: Antony Ferguson
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Publisher's summary

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 (when we can discern his personality at all) 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 morning and evening 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.

Gardiner's background as a historian has encouraged him to search for ways in which scholarship and performance can cooperate and fruitfully coalesce. This has entailed piecing together the few biographical shards, scrutinizing the music, and watching for those instances when Bach's personality seems to penetrate the fabric of his notation. Gardiner's aim is "to give the reader a sense of inhabiting the same experiences and sensations that Bach might have had in the act of music-making. This, I try to show, can help us arrive at a more human likeness discernible in the closely related processes of composing and performing his music." It is very rare that such an accomplished performer of music should also be a considerable writer and thinker about it. John Eliot Gardiner takes us as deeply into Bach’s works and mind as perhaps words can. The result is a unique book about one of the greatest of all creative artists.

©2013 John Eliot Gardiner (P)2014 Audible Inc.

What listeners say about Bach

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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    2 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Brilliant book badly presented

Gardiner's brilliant investigation of the man through the music is thrilling and moving. Ferguson's reading could be worse, but not much. His intonation is generally passable, but he is clearly not competent to read this book. Technical music terms, but also multisyllabic academic expressions flummox him, receiving weird emphases and pauses that force the reader to guess what is really being said, not to mention disrupting the illusion that the reader is speaking with understanding. That's not even to count the sporadic errors like "Bach finds the means to take the string out of the aggression".

Worst of all is his pronunciation of German, which is crucial to a biography of Bach. One wonders why Ferguson didn't look at the text and just decide that it would be too embarrassing: Either he should pass on the job, or spend an hour or two at least learning some of the basics of German pronunciation. He sounds like a computer programmed to pronounce English written text, fed with German writing and just ploughing through it. It would be barely less comprehensible -- and less disruptive to the reader -- if the German expressions and texts were simply cut out and replaced with silence or white noise..

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35 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Fire the Reader!!!

Gardiner's book is fascinating, personal and based on current research, but it would be hard to imagine a reading that was less cognizant of musical or theological terms. In nearly every paragraph, the reader mispronounces terms in Latin, Italian, German and even English! It was infuriating at times, making it a struggle to listen to the end.

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20 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    3 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

A Deep History of Bach

Is there anything you would change about this book?

I listen to about three books a week, so I have a broad experience in the varying qualities of books of various genres. I've listened to longer histories, Toland's biography of Hitler, for example, and I have to say that this history of Bach must be one of those books that just needs to be read, not heard. The narration is very precise, which does not necessarily equal pleasant reading. I ended up returning this book, simply because there was not enough movement in the narrative to maintain my interest.

What was the most interesting aspect of this story? The least interesting?

I did appreciate the scholarship in this book, but it does not make for interesting listening.

Did Antony Ferguson do a good job differentiating all the characters? How?

None at all.

Could you see Bach being made into a movie or a TV series? Who should the stars be?

Not a chance.

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13 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

BacK ?? A bad joke !

How do I wish I had read the reviews. It is all there. When in the beginning the name pronounced as „BacK“, I knew that I could not go on. That such a brilliant author would be paired with such an incompetent reader speaks very poorly about audible. Sadly, there is no return, nor any consolation for crushed expectations.

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7 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    3 out of 5 stars

Interesting

The author is a well known Conductor in England. He is the founder of the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists. In some ways this book is an autobiography of Gardiner and his search for information to understand Bach, wrapped in a biography of Bach.

Gardiner tells of the difficulties Bach had with his employers throughout his career and his recurrent refusal to accept authority. He tells of Bach’s life as an orphan and his problems with schools. Gardiner book is dense with fact and full of diversions. The book is also rich in informal conjectures. He writes of Back’s gradual turn from what listeners today might consider “the parochiality of the liturgical context” to “music that shows more and more signs of an almost limitless appeal.” Gardiner speculates “It is entirely possible that Bach’s growing disenchantment with Cantatas in the 1730s arose from a since that the communality of belief that he had once shared with his congregation was breaking down, and that, for whatever reason, he was now failing to make his mark.”

The author writes in a lively, conversational style. Gardiner has done an excellent job of painting us a picture of Bach considering how little information about him is available. Antony Ferguson does a great job narrating the book.

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7 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    3 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

3 Stars for Being Too Deep for Me

I'm trying, as an adult beginner, to learn something about music by taking violin lessons. Even playing a few Bach things, on an elementary level. The instrument is a beast and I was hoping to glean some insight into the musical process by listening to this tome.

Unfortunately, this is the second book I have had to abandon. (The first, "The Night Circus", was ended mid-listen because of lack of plot movement and character development -- it was a novel, unlike this history/biography. That abandonment was due to the author's superficial approach to the novel's structure, unlike this book's profile: way too technical and fathoms too deep for my understanding.) So alas, "Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven" is too esoteric for me, a mere musical bimbo, wanting to hear about a genius I have only recently begun to appreciate.

Someone who has a firm foundation in musical studies and performance will probably find this book accessible. I was unable to intellectually crack the musical terminologies and references to Bach and other artists' works-- through my own unfamiliarity, not because the book was poorly written or faulty in its structure. I often thought while listening that the one advantage of this audio production was (maybe) the musical references should have actually been played and incorporated into the text since there would be a reference to a passage, not only by Bach but by some other composer, and I would be lost. I just didn't know the piece and the thread of purpose in its mention was meaningless to me.

I don't know German, either, so there was nothing to forgive on my end for mispronunciation of German terms by Mr. Ferguson, something mentioned in other reviews.

But that was me. If you know music and didn't study French for your art history degree, you might really get into this work. Because chewing through and ingesting this information is real work.

And by the way, great title, Mr. Gardiner.

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5 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    2 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Better read than listen to this one!

For a book about a musician, this book has the least musical narrator I've come upon. His accent is so uneven. Is he British? Aussie? American? When he is quoting something where a slight to the source is implied he seems to put on an American southerner accent. Well, the question alone of what he was trying for with this strange mix of accents is quite distracting. I really feel like he ruins a most excellent book. John Eliot Gardner's writing dances along like his conducting a Bach Cantatta. To bad the narrator has not the least lilt in his voice to accompany such a soaring narrative!

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5 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Good English, poor German

I loved the narrator's moderate British diction. He failed, however, to render the frequent German titles and phrases in a consistently accurate pronunciation. He seems to know that "ei" is different from "ie," that "v" is spoken as "f" and "w" as "v," but he rarely succeeds in getting it right. Probably he took a couple of years of college German and passed at the bottom of his class.

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4 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
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    2 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Great book, frustrating narrator

This is a wonderful and thorough book ruined in this instance by a bad narrator. He has the annoying habit of halting before German words or phrases, and his pronunciation of words such as "Thuringia" is inconsistent throughout. It is all the more disappointing after hearing such flawless narrators as Grover Gardner and Simon Vance. I hope this is re-done, because I would like to enjoy it in audiobook form, but not like this.

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3 people found this helpful

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    4 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Erudite book wrecked by narrator's pronunciation

Antony Ferguson has a fine voice, but I wonder why he would elect to read a book filled with references which he clearly lacks the education to impart?
John Eliot Gardiner is an erudite curator of the finest Western musical art, fluent in Italian, German, French, and Latin. He writes with the authority of one who assumes you will follow his switches between language, because to stop for every translation would be cumbersome. Gardiner writes for an educated audience. I would think it obvious that a reader of this book should feel fully confident in the pronunciation of those languages before taking on a project of this erudition. Unfortunately, not only do cringeworthy mispronunciations happen every minute in this reading, but even simple English language words are savaged. Was Mr. Ferguson in a rush to get this recorded? As an Englishman and classically trained actor, does he struggle with his native language as much as this reading would suggest? Worse, there are strange pauses in the reading rhythm that suggest that when he arrives at a word he doesn't know, he leaves an editing space, then fills it in later (often incorrectly.) This amounts to a kind of halting, monotonous experience lacking in phrasing, narrative tension and, ... dare I say it ... music! I hope Audible will find a reader who is as conversant in continental languages as Gardiner, in order to do justice to the author's deep research and humanity.

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2 people found this helpful