The True Life of Johann Sebastian Bach by Klaus Eidam
© Michelle Troutman
July 3, 2001
ISBN #: 0-465-01861-0
$35.00, hardcover
413 pages
Musician and composer Johann Sebastian Bach is one of the most misunderstood men in music history, according to the many assumptions author Klaus Eidam debunks about his life and music. Eidam approaches his subject rationally, backing his beliefs with facts.
Bach, born in Eisenach, Germany in 1685, was orphaned at age 10 and raised by his older brother Johann Christoph. He came from seven generations of musicians; three of his children (Wilhelm Friedemann, Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach, and Johann Christian Bach) also became musician/composers. Johann Sebastian composed during the Baroque period of classical music, which lasted from 1600 to his death in 1750. Unlike most of his contemporaries and successors, Bach composed his numerous pieces in his spare time while working in the music field, first as a violinist, church organist, and chamber musician to Prince Johann Ernest and Duke Wilhelm Ernst of Saxe-Weimar, then court music director to Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen and the Duke of Weissenfels, and later as a choirmaster and music director for the St. Thomas School in Leipzig, Germany. To meet his own musical demands, he used "well-tempered" tuning for producing purity of tone. He wrote several fugues and cantatas; his Goldberg Variations, St. John Passion, St. Matthew Passion, Well-Tempered Clavier, and Art of Fugue are considered among his best works.
An organist and theater dramatist, Eidam has written television specials on Bach and composers George Frideric Handel, Felix Mendelssohn, Franz Joseph Haydn, and Carl Weber. In The True Life of J.S. Bach, to fill in Bach's sketchy life, he tackles the misnomers previous Bach biographers have spread, such as Albert Schweitzer, Charles Sanford Terry, and Philipp Spitta, whose two-volume biography earlier writers have used as a source. He attacks them for not examining Bach's life deeply enough. For years, Bach has been thought a hot-head, mainly because of an incident Spitta recounted in which Bach threw his wig at university music director Johann Gottlieb Görner over some wrong notes during a rehearsal for the St. Matthew Passion. Not so, says Eidam: despite that occurence, no evidence reveals an ill-tempered Bach. Other biographers praise one of Bach's biggest nemeses for his contributions to the arts, the duke of Saxe-Weimar, when in fact, he jailed those who opposed him. Bach had applied for a higher post as court music director, but for defying the duke's orders against playing with his nephew Ernst August (according to his contract he was working for both courts), he cancelled Bach's paper allotment for his compositions, and he jailed him for refusing to compose more music for him.
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