Ode to Johann Sebastian Bach

This book is an attempt at a novel about Johann Sebastian Bach, the most profound artist in the Western Tradition and yet the most ordinary seeming. We all know the portrait of the portly, bewigged, aging gent, holding in chubby hands a tiny piece of paper inscribed with a geometry of notes. How unheroic, how how dull he looks — except for those eyes. But who was he? Less is known about him than about any major composer of the past 400 years; we know that he was married twice; that he fathered twenty children — ten of whom survived. We know that his life was a constant struggle with bureaucracy; that he labored always in the thick of things; that his workload was superhuman. We also know that he hated authority figures and was always at odds with his supervisors. But still, less is known about him in spite of more having been written about him, than any other major composer.

My humble Ode comes from a seven year listening project, focused on the 200 Sacred Cantatas. The Sacred Cantatas, Bach's crowning achievement, were produced at the rate on one per week at the hight of his creativity and he wrote over 350 of them of which only 200 have survived. For me that means the same spirit that informed his improvisations was what enabled him to produce Cantatas at such a staggering rate. I thought of his extraordinary abilities as an improvisor on the organ; in his youth he was known to have improvised for over three hours on a single theme. Perhaps a way into his life I thought, might be to focus on his youth, when many of his great organ works were written and when he shone like the sun in improvisation. As with todays youth and their jam-bands, one imagines Bach must have had a cult following. This novel imagines an early eighteenth century rag-tag group of Bach cult followers and tells the story of his teenage years and early youth from their point of view. Since so little is known of this period in Bach's life much is left open to the imagination; however the story is woven on the framework of historical events as outlined in John Elliot Gardiner's excellent biographical treatment, Music in the Castle of Heaven, 2013.