Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

A conductor's Bach pilgrimage

by
June–July 2014, no. 362

Music in the Castle of Heaven: A portrait of Johann Sebastian Bach by John Eliot Gardiner

Allen Lane, $49.99 hb, 663 pp

A conductor's Bach pilgrimage

by
June–July 2014, no. 362

I was a part-time pilgrim on John Eliot Gardiner’s extraordinary year-long journey, from Christmas 1999 to New Year’s Eve 2000, when he took Johann Sebastian Bach on the road. Gardiner’s Bach Cantata Pilgrimage, with his fifteen-member Monteverdi Choir and the twenty instrumentalists of the English Baroque Soloists, performed in Britain, Europe, and the United States all of JSB’s 198 surviving sacred cantatas on the liturgically appropriate days for which they were composed.

 At the time, I was engaged on a smaller, more personal devotional journey. The 2000 Melbourne Festival was marking the 250th anniversary of Bach’s death with a substantial program of his works. It seemed a good idea to write about JSB from the point of view of his heartland. That’s why, on a Saturday after Easter, I was in the Peterskirche in Görlitz, a small town on the German–Polish border – the latest stop on Gardiner’s pilgrimage and, indeed, mine. The pilgrims played three cantatas, the town choir joining in the chorales. The minister described the event as one of the greatest days in the cathedral, which is saying something, since there has been a church on that site since the thirteenth century.

Michael Shmith reviews 'Music in the Castle of Heaven: A portrait of Johann Sebastian Bach' by John Eliot Gardiner

Music in the Castle of Heaven: A portrait of Johann Sebastian Bach

by John Eliot Gardiner

Allen Lane, $49.99 hb, 663 pp

Leave a comment

If you are an ABR subscriber, you will need to sign in to post a comment.

If you have forgotten your sign in details, or if you receive an error message when trying to submit your comment, please email your comment (and the name of the article to which it relates) to ABR Comments. We will review your comment and, subject to approval, we will post it under your name.

Please note that all comments must be approved by ABR and comply with our Terms & Conditions.