Christoph Wolff may have taken a certain risk in subtitling his new Bach biography "The Learned Musician". Not alone does the ideology of entertainment and relaxation recoil at the notion of erudition, but those composers who nowadays profess a concern with "spirituality" are eager to distance themselves from structural concerns that might impede their professed intimacy with the Divine - John Tavener springs to mind.
Nonetheless, Wolff returns again and again to the assessment of Bach by his contemporaries as a musical counterpart to Newton - who in turn was seen as both scientist and philosopher - and is at pains to clarify the integrated worldview this implies. Paradoxically, the result is to suggest a powerful modernity inherent in Bach's conception of the creative process: "Bach's definition of musical thinking . . . makes no reference to form and genre as objects of learning . . . Bach conceived of compositional method primarily in abstract functional terms . . . What Bach dubbed musical thinking was . . . nothing less than the conscious application of generative and formative procedures - the meticulous rationalisation of the creative act."
Wolff offers a marvellously detailed analysis of the "riddle canon" Trias harmonica which proceeds from an eight-note enigma through the C-major triad to the very definitions of time and space, and beyond these to "a true mirror of the well-ordered universe" and the dogma of the Holy Trinity.
Ultimately, of course, the understanding of composition "not as an act of free creation but rather as a process of imaginative research into the harmonic implications of the chosen subject matter" had as its aim the knowledge of God, defined as "a harmonic being" by the Society of Musical Science to which Bach contributed his Musical Offering and Canonic Variations on `Vom Himmel hoch'.
So where, one might ask, do these weighty considerations leave the Air on the G String? Such a question only became possible once the Enlightenment sensibility had disintegrated: Bach would not have understood the notion that pleasure and relaxation ("entertainment") are somehow exclusive of science and spirituality. However didactic the conception behind many of Bach's works, they are invariably intended "for music lovers, to refresh their spirits" (the stipulation found on the title pages of the ClavierUbung series).
The authentic portrait of the composer by Elias Gottlob Haumann (reproduced here both on cover and frontispiece) shows him holding a page of music - an encoded triple canon, no less - and wearing a rather forbidding look. Wolff comments: "Bach the man takes a back seat to his work, and that is how we have always understood him."
Nonetheless, Wolff recapitulates what is known about his subject's life in a lively style and deduces a great deal more by dint of diligent detective-work. Bach was habitually even-tempered, but apt to flare up violently when his art was at issue. He was convivial, his home "like a pigeonry" in the words of his most distinguished son, Carl Philipp Emanuel. He drank beer copiously, and was never without a bottle of brandy when he retired to compose, which activity he usually pursued (in later years) away from the keyboard. Unlike Handel and Telemann he was no great traveller, yet "the greater universe of scholarship" he inhabited was "not defined by geographic boundaries".
His only forays outside Northern Germany were to Carlsbad in Bohemia, and the second and last of these was associated with an almost unimaginable tragedy: he returned to find that his wife Maria Barbara "whom he had left . . . hale and hearty on his departure" was already dead and buried. Towards his second wife, Anna Magdalena, he was unfailingly loving and attentive, regularly bringing her such gifts as "a singing-bird and carnations". As a father (he had 20 children, only 10 of whom survived childhood) he was passionately and perhaps intimidatingly supportive.
In 1789, two years before his own death, Mozart visited the St Thomas School in Leipzig (where Bach had been Cantor) and was amazed to find that a Bach performance tradition had survived intact: "Hardly had the choir sung a few measures when Mozart sat up, startled . . . And now his whole soul seemed to be in his ears. When the singing was finished he cried out, full of joy: `Now there is something one can learn from!' "
The same might be said of this book.
Raymond Deane is a composer. His most recent work, Ripieno, was premiered by the National Symphony Orchestra earlier this month.