One of the Best Books of the Year
*The Economist*The Christian Science Monitor*Financial Times *
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 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 day on the stairs of his parents house, where it hung for safety during World War II. He has been studying and performing Bach ever since, and is now regarded as...