BOOK OF THE DAY: Harmony & Discord By Julian Shuckburgh Old Street Publishing, 390 pp, £25
UNLIKE MOST major biographies of Bach, Julian Shuckburgh's Harmony & Discorddoes not set out to be a scholarly examination of the life and music of a great composer.
Instead, the reader is drawn into the musical world of early 18th century Germany and the personal life of Johann Sebastian Bach, born in Eisenach in Thuringia in 1685. Here we find a genuine attempt to recreate the everyday world in which the composer lived.
From the start, Shuckburgh sets out to depict for the reader the family life and social standing of Bach the child, whose father was a professional musician. Descriptions of a happy childhood and early education are overshadowed by stories of illnesses and plagues which were to claim siblings, cousins and eventually both of Johann Sebastian’s parents by the time he was nine years old. Subsequently, in the care of his older brother Johann Christoph, we read how the young Bach continued his musical education at Ohrdruf and from 1700 at Lüneburg, following an arduous 200-mile journey on foot which he undertook with his friend Georg Erdmann.
The story of the adult musician emerges with Bach's first appointment as court musician at Weimar in 1703, and as the narrative continues we are presented with details of his various appointments as court organist and Capellmeisterat Arnstadt, Mühlhausen, Weimar and Cöthen, and finally as music director and cantor at St Thomas School, Leipzig.
Simultaneously, the personal life of the composer is revealed – his marriages, the births and sometimes tragic deaths of his many children, and the circumstances which may have contributed to and even influenced the creation of his most significant musical compositions.
Shuckburgh's quest is not to add to the many previous volumes which portray Bach as an almost god-like hero with an intensely virtuous and largely unblemished personality, but to question such assumptions which have become commonplace since the publication of JN Forkel's Biography of Bachin 1802.
With the help of direct quotations from Bach’s letters to his superiors at various churches and courts, Shuckburgh seeks to reveal the humanity of Bach, to expose to the reader his character, strengths, frailties and failings. In doing so he also seeks to reveal why Bach, despite his extraordinary talents, was, unlike his contemporaries Handel and Telemann, never to achieve an international profile in his day. In fact the reader discovers that very little of Bach’s music was published during his lifetime, his gravestone was never inscribed and his wife died in poverty in 1760.
At times Shuckburgh’s understanding of the range and quality of Bach’s compositions comes across as being limited to his own personal knowledge of specific works. One also gets the impression that the general narrative would have been improved, firstly, by eliminating music-related explanations that could quite as easily have been put in the footnotes, and secondly, by clarifying specific terminology.
However, Shuckburgh's enthusiasm and passion for the music of Bach shines through Harmony & Discord. He is writing for the Bach enthusiast rather than the Bach specialist and therefore this volume will appeal to a wide readership.
Ite O’Donovan is director of The Lassus Scholars and Piccolo Lasso choirs