Music In The Castle Of Heaven: A Portrait of Johann Sebastian Bach - Tapa dura

Johann Sebastian Bach is one of the most unfathomable composers in the history of music. How can such sublime work have been produced by a man who (when we can discern his personality at all) seems so ordinary, so opaque - and occasionally so intemperate?

John Eliot Gardiner grew up passing one of the only two authentic portraits of Bach every morning and evening on the stairs of his parents' house, where it hung for safety during the Second World War. He has been studying and performing Bach ever since, and is now regarded as one of the composer's greatest living interpreters. The fruits of this lifetime's immersion are distilled in this remarkable book, grounded in the most recent Bach scholarship but moving far beyond it, which explains in wonderful detail the ideas on which Bach drew, how he worked, how his music is constructed, how it achieves its effects - and what it can tell us about Bach the man.

Gardiner's background as a historian has encouraged him to search for ways in which scholarship and performance can cooperate and fruitfully coalesce. This has entailed piecing together the few biographical shards, scrutinising the music, and watching for those instances when Bach's personality seems to penetrate the fabric of his notation. Gardiner's aim is 'to give the reader a sense of inhabiting the same experiences and sensations that Bach might have had in the act of music-making. This, I try to show, can help us arrive at a more human likeness discernible in the closely related processes of composing and performing his music.'

It is very rare that such an accomplished performer of music should also be a considerable writer and thinker about it. John Eliot Gardiner takes us as deeply into Bach's works and mind as perhaps words can. The result is a unique book about one of the greatest of all creative artists.

SIR JOHN ELIOT GARDINER is one of the world's leading conductors, not only of Baroque music but across the whole repertoire. He founded the Monteverdi Choir and Orchestra, the Orchestre de l'Opéra de Lyon, the English Baroque Soloists, and the Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique. He has conducted most of the world's great orchestras and in many of the leading opera houses. He lives and farms in Dorset.

'John Eliot Gardiner's book is, apart from anything else, a tremendous feat of narrative: he has the rare gift of always putting the camera in the right place. He tells this long and richly involved story in a way that makes everything clear, and sets the life and the music in a historical perspective where every detail is relevant and every comment illuminating. Simply as a biography this is splendid, but the fact that it comes with such a wealth of musical understanding and experience makes it invaluable. I learned an enormous amount, and I know I'll return to it again and again' - Philip Pullman

'How typical of John Eliot Gardiner to combine such great erudition with equal passion and enthusiasm. His book made me want to rush and listen to all the music he writes about, whether familiar or unfamiliar. A wonderful treasure chest' - Sir Simon Rattle

'There is something awesome about John Eliot Gardiner's achievement in this book: the interpretation of what to most of us can appear a great and mysterious force by a man whose entire life has prepared him for the task. Stunning' - Tom Holland

'A most impressive book. Not only does it contain an accessible guide to many of the major works of JS Bach, it also presents a well-considered portrait of the composer and his creative character. John Eliot Gardiner's observations from his own experience in conducting Bach's music give a convincing and authentic authority to his writing. It draws on all the most recent research on Bach, and remarkably presents much new material. This book is going to be as indispensible to Bach scholars as it is to general readers' - John Butt

'Music in the Castle of Heaven is a unique portrait of one of the greatest musical geniuses of all time by one of the greatest musical geniuses of our own age. John Eliot Gardiner uses his extraordinary immersion in Bach's music to illuminate Bach the man more brilliantly than in any previous work, and has created his own deeply moving work of art' - Amanda Foreman

'A superb achievement, scholarly, lively, controversial and judicious. Like all great biographies of creative artists it builds a bridge from the past to the present and brings the work to new life' - Ian Bostridge