Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven, by John Eliot Gardiner

Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven is idiosyncratic and often highly personal, but also magisterial and erudite in considering the works and their enigmatic creator. Its strengths rise directly from Gardiner’s insights as performer and conductor. He probes what we know of Bach the man and his cultural and historical context, then his compositional processes and habits. The revelatory core of the book comes in chapters on the cantata cycles, each of the surviving Passions, and the Mass in B-minor. (For the keyboard and other instrumental works you’ll need to look elsewhere; for a full-out bio, nothing beats Christoph Wolff’s book.)

Gardiner sees Bach as “a thoroughly imperfect human being—something we don’t usually tolerate in one of our heroes” (p. 525). (Hmmm, that could be said of the author as well . . .) For me, his book about this central composer remains a near-perfect blend of scholarship and infectious enthusiasm.