John Eliot 

Gardiner: I think there’s been a slightly deplorable

tendency amongst Bach’s biographers to paint Bach the human
being in a very complimentary light.  To imply that great music
requires a great man and a great human being and a great
personality to be behind it.  Well, of course great music requires
a creator but it doesn’t have to be a paragon – he doesn’t have
to be a paragon of virtue.  And Bach certainly wasn’t.

 The more that one discovers about him, the more one
discovers that he was a deeply flawed character.  That even
though we have very, very few family records and letters to go
on there are incidents that keep cropping up in his life at almost
a repetitive pattern of antagonistic behavior between him and
authority – the authorities for whom he worked.  He was very
combative.  He really took them on.  

But I think we can trace it back really to his earliest times.  All
right he started off in a presumably very happy family situation
with both parents living but he didn’t go to school very often.
We have a lot of records of truancy.  Now, why?  Why was he
not at school?  That’s one big question.  Then comes the double
shock of both parents dying before he’s ten.  And his upheaval
rooted as he was in Eisenach.  He’s now uprooted and he goes
to live with his elder brother, Johann Christoph, a few miles
away in Ohrdruf.

And suddenly his grades shoot up, a reaction to his orphanhood

– who knows.  But the more I’ve been able to delve into the
circumstances and the context of his schooling, the worse it
becomes.  It looks as if the schools – both the first two schools
that he was involved in were prone to very modern sounding
difficulties of, you know, overcrowding in classrooms, shortage
of textbooks, hooliganism in the classroom, lobbing of bricks
through windows, chasing of the girls, coming to school with
daggers and spears and a good deal of unpleasant bullying and
sadistic behavior.
There was one particular schoolmaster of Bach’s when he was
in Ohrdruf and he was probably then only about 11 or 12 who
was known as the bully and the sadist of the school.  And
eventually he got handed his cards and he left but not before
inflicting God knows what damage on his pupils.  And this is a
theme that goes all the way through Bach’s schooling and we
can’t say with assurance – well, he was damaged.  But it does
come out in certain ways.

For example, in his very first job that was when he was organist
in Arnstadt.  He gets into a quarrel with a bassoonist.  He writes
a piece of music with a rather difficult couple of riffs for the
bassoon and the bassoonist obviously makes a complete mess
of it, he can’t handle it.  So Bach swears at him and calls him
something pretty rude and the guy reacts by setting upon him
in the market square.  He comes up to him with a cudgel and
Bach draws his sword and defends himself.  And there’s
tremendous fisticuffs which is only broken up by the onlookers.

And Bach goes off to his employers and says, “What’s all that?
You know, you’ve got to protect me.”  And they don’t.  That
leads to a feeling of suspicion of authority that runs right away
through his life.  And it comes up again and again and again.
And that comes into the foreground when he’s working in
Weimar for the two dukes – the Duke Wilhelm Ernest and his
nephew who share the authority.

And Bach is unhappy there.  He feels he’s been passed over for
the succession to become Kapellmeister.  He feels aggrieved.
He looks for another job.  He’s appointed, and he doesn’t get
permission from the Dukes to leave.  So they throw him into
prison and for a month he’s disgraced and imprisoned.  It
doesn’t happen again as far as we know but he’s picking fights
pretty much all the way through his life and unnecessarily.
Right towards the end of his life when he’s achieved the most
extraordinary quality of his output including, you know, the two
passions, the Art of Fugue, The Well-Tempered Clavier, all the
Brandenburg concertos, this fantastic body of cantatas – he
picks a fight which doesn’t – isn’t even on his patch.  It’s down
the road where a headmaster of a school says there shouldn’t
be too much music in this school of mine anymore.  The
emphasis should be on the academic curriculum.

And Bach calls the headmaster which in German is rector.  He

calls him dreck ohr – a very school boyish pun on words.  And
dreck ohr means dirty ear.  Why did he get himself involved
unnecessarily in all that.  It’s as though he couldn’t resist it.  So
I think it would be a great mistake to try to align this concept of
divine music and a divine human being behind it.  And, in fact, I
would say the opposite.  The very fact that this music is so
profound and so uplifting and the man is clearly not a saint
makes it all the more interesting.  It makes it much more
human and makes it much more approachable.

 Directed/Produced by Jonathan Fowler and Dillon Fitton

Gardiner, author of the new book, Bach: Music in the Castle of

Heaven, has a unique perspective on Bach. He is both a

historian and a world-renowned conductor who has throughout

his career made hundreds of recordings on the prestigious

Deutsche Grammophon label. Bach, the orphan rebel, had a

suspicion of authority that ran deep throughout his life, and

made him an often domineering and unpleasant person to deal

with.
Gardiner doesn't see any contradiction here. "The very fact that

this music is so profound and so uplifting and the man is clearly

not a saint makes it all the more interesting," he says.