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A review by veronicafrance
The Cello Suites: In Search of a Baroque Masterpiece by Eric Siblin
3.0
Don't pick this book up expecting profound insights or detailed musicology -- you will inevitably be disappointed. The author is a former pop music journalist and he admits upfront that he's not that knowledgeable about music (he can't even read music for heaven's sake! Although he does play the guitar). He happened upon the Bach cello suites ate a concert in Montreal that he went to on the spur of the moment, and was fascinated.
The cello suites are by no means the best-known or most popular of Bach's works, but Siblin set off to find out more about them. What he ended up with is a book that combines a brief outline of Bach's life, a more detailed account of cellist Pau Casal's life, and Siblin's own story of his research. Why Casals? Because he bought a tattered old score of the cello suites in a Barcelona bookshop when he first took up the cello as a teenager in the 1890s, and played them nearly every day thereafter. He didn't perform them in public until much later, and his recording came later still. He was the most famous and respected cellist in the world by then, so he was single-handedly responsible for changing the image of the suites from dry-as-dust exercises to passionate, emotional music. They now seem to be a sine qua non of any cellist's repertoire, judging by the number of recordings.
So this book is not profound, but I enjoyed learning about how Bach struggled to have a meaningful career in the scattered principalities of what was not yet Germany. I am still astounded that in his day he was not considered a significant composer, even if he was respected as a skilled organist. What was wrong with these people?? They should have been fighting to employ him and give him time and space to compose, instead of wasting his time leading choirs of schoolchildren at public executions (although he didn't do badly composition-wise considering ...). Not that much is known about Bach's personal life, but Siblin manages to fill in enough detail to give us a sense of his character.
I also enjoyed some of Siblin's own adventures; he was brave enough to (very briefly) learn to play the cello in order to gain further insight. And later he goes to a choral weekend to sing and perform a Bach cantata -- also brave, given that he's not a singer and can't sightread well enough to learn the music. I did enjoy the insight he gained from the experience of performing Bach: "my voice as a single wave in a blissful polyphonic ocean of Bach". He goes on to reflect: "... it struck me as amazing how much this one individual has given to posterity. How many children and students, professionals and amateurs, virtuosos and maestros, not to mention listeners, have done what we were doing for three hundred years, trying to master something purely aesthetic, trying to break a code that connects us to something greater, more accomplished, more perfect than ourselves." The naive enthusiasm of a layman is more touching than a musicologist's expert analysis. And it does evoke how it feel to join in making music.
I think my favourite part of the book was suite no. 5, where Siblin briefly covers how Bach has been reinterpreted and reworked through the ages. Although paradoxically this is the section where more musical knowledge on his part would have been appreciated -- I'd have liked much more detail.
Finally, these pieces for solo cello are very atypical of Bach's prodigious output, as he's associated above all with polyphony. You can't play polyphony on a cello, because you can't stop more than two strings at a time. So no chords. In that sense there's something missing from the book. But then it doesn't pretend to be more than it is -- an enthusiastic amateur sharing his discoveries through a chance encounter with these suites.
The cello suites are by no means the best-known or most popular of Bach's works, but Siblin set off to find out more about them. What he ended up with is a book that combines a brief outline of Bach's life, a more detailed account of cellist Pau Casal's life, and Siblin's own story of his research. Why Casals? Because he bought a tattered old score of the cello suites in a Barcelona bookshop when he first took up the cello as a teenager in the 1890s, and played them nearly every day thereafter. He didn't perform them in public until much later, and his recording came later still. He was the most famous and respected cellist in the world by then, so he was single-handedly responsible for changing the image of the suites from dry-as-dust exercises to passionate, emotional music. They now seem to be a sine qua non of any cellist's repertoire, judging by the number of recordings.
So this book is not profound, but I enjoyed learning about how Bach struggled to have a meaningful career in the scattered principalities of what was not yet Germany. I am still astounded that in his day he was not considered a significant composer, even if he was respected as a skilled organist. What was wrong with these people?? They should have been fighting to employ him and give him time and space to compose, instead of wasting his time leading choirs of schoolchildren at public executions (although he didn't do badly composition-wise considering ...). Not that much is known about Bach's personal life, but Siblin manages to fill in enough detail to give us a sense of his character.
I also enjoyed some of Siblin's own adventures; he was brave enough to (very briefly) learn to play the cello in order to gain further insight. And later he goes to a choral weekend to sing and perform a Bach cantata -- also brave, given that he's not a singer and can't sightread well enough to learn the music. I did enjoy the insight he gained from the experience of performing Bach: "my voice as a single wave in a blissful polyphonic ocean of Bach". He goes on to reflect: "... it struck me as amazing how much this one individual has given to posterity. How many children and students, professionals and amateurs, virtuosos and maestros, not to mention listeners, have done what we were doing for three hundred years, trying to master something purely aesthetic, trying to break a code that connects us to something greater, more accomplished, more perfect than ourselves." The naive enthusiasm of a layman is more touching than a musicologist's expert analysis. And it does evoke how it feel to join in making music.
I think my favourite part of the book was suite no. 5, where Siblin briefly covers how Bach has been reinterpreted and reworked through the ages. Although paradoxically this is the section where more musical knowledge on his part would have been appreciated -- I'd have liked much more detail.
Finally, these pieces for solo cello are very atypical of Bach's prodigious output, as he's associated above all with polyphony. You can't play polyphony on a cello, because you can't stop more than two strings at a time. So no chords. In that sense there's something missing from the book. But then it doesn't pretend to be more than it is -- an enthusiastic amateur sharing his discoveries through a chance encounter with these suites.