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The Cello Suites: J. S. Bach, Pablo Casals, and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece, by Eric Siblin
PDF Ebook The Cello Suites: J. S. Bach, Pablo Casals, and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece, by Eric Siblin
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One evening, journalist Eric Siblin attended a recital of Johann Sebastian Bach's Cello Suites and began an epic quest that would unravel three centuries of intrigue, politics, and passion. Winner of the Mavis Gallant Prize for Nonfiction and the McAuslan First Book Prize, The Cello Suites weaves together three dramatic narratives: the disappearance of Bach's manuscript in the eighteenth century; Pablo Casals's discovery and popularization of the music in Spain in the late-nineteenth century; and Siblin's infatuation with the suites in the present day. The search led Siblin to Barcelona, where Casals, just thirteen and in possession of his first cello, roamed the backstreets with his father in search of sheet music and found Bach's lost suites tucked in a dark corner of a store. Casals played them every day for twelve years before finally performing them in public. Siblin pursues the mysteries that continue to haunt this music more than 250 years after its composer's death: Why did Bach compose the suites for the cello, then considered a lowly instrument? What happened to the original manuscript? A seamless blend of biography and music history, The Cello Suites is a true-life journey of discovery, fueled by the power of these musical masterpieces.
- Sales Rank: #89914 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Grove Press
- Published on: 2011-01-04
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.25" h x 5.50" w x .75" l, .65 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 336 pages
Features
- Used Book in Good Condition
From Publishers Weekly
The ironies of artistic genius and public taste are subtly explored in this winding, entertaining tale of a musical masterpiece. Music critic Siblin parallels short, fluent biographies of composer Johann Sebastian Bach, whose six suites for solo cello were long disparaged as minor student exercises, and cello virtuoso Pablo Casals, whose landmark recording of the pieces catapulted them into the classical canon. Their lives are a study in contrasts: Bach is an obscure workaday musician who feels wasted being merely the cantor of a Lutheran boarding school; Casals, a musical superstar and anti-Fascist exile, is a romantic hero. Siblin intertwines his own story of trying to engage with the suites. He takes cello lessons, savors a rich variety of performances, including one on the marimbas, and embarks on a search for Bach's long-lost manuscript to discover clues to the enigmatic score. (Scholars aren't even certain the suites were written for cello.) Siblin is an insightful writer with an ability to convey the sound and emotional impact of music in words. (Jan.)
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From Booklist
*Starred Review* A former pop-music critic, Siblin was transported to the eighteenth century when his imagination was captured by a performance of Bach’s Six Suites for Solo Cello. He embarked on a journey—part historical, part personal—to discover for himself the music that has remained a pillar of the cello repertoire since Pablo Casals recorded the suites in 1936. Siblin traveled to Leipzig looking for traces of the German composer, and to the Catalonian coast of Spain to trace the steps of the suites’ first modern master. Included in his thorough research are interviews with cellists such as Mischa Maisky and Anner Bylsma, who describe the complexities of the music and the challenges it presents to the soloist. In Siblin’s history of the composer, Bach is far from the stuffy image often applied to classical music; he appears restless, brash, and proud, occasionally landing in jail for upsetting a patron. Siblin’s writing is most inspired when describing the life of Casals, showing a genuine affection for the cellist, who, caught in the throes of the Spanish civil war and World War II, used his instrument and the suites as weapons of protest and pleas for peace. --Elliot Mandel
Review
“This is one of the most extraordinary, clever, beautiful, and impeccably researched books I have read in years. A fascinating story deftly told—and, for me at least, ideally read with Bach’s thirty-six movements playing softly in the background; a recipe for literary rapture.”—Simon Winchester, author of the New York Times best-seller The Professor and the Madman
“Vividly chronicles [Siblin’s] international search for the original, and unfound, Bach score…Mr. Siblin’s book is well researched, and filled with enough anecdotes to engage even the classical-music aficionado…but the book is best distinguished by its writing. To vivify music in words is not easy. But Mr. Siblin…rises to the task…Read The Cello Suites—preferably with their melodious hum in the background—and you will never look at a cello in quite the same way again.”—The Economist
“This is rich terrain, and Siblin’s book is an engrossing combination of musical and political history spiced with generally vivid descriptions of the cello suites themselves…[Siblin] has given us a compelling portrait of a passionate, prickly Bach, of Casals, a musician who was also politically engaged, and an engrossing cast of secondary characters. Best of all, The Cello Suites makes us want to pop in a CD and really listen to those cello suites. Awesome.”—Wynne Delacoma, Chicago Sun-Times
“A work of ever-percolating interest. Mr. Siblin winds up mixing high and low musical forms, art and political histories, Bach’s and Casals’s individual stories and matters of arcane musicology into a single inquisitive volume.”—Janet Maslin, The New York Times
“The ironies of artistic genius and public taste are subtly explored in this winding, entertaining tale of a musical masterpiece…Siblin is an insightful writer with an ability to convey the sound and emotional impact of music in words.”—Publishers Weekly
“Engaging and imaginative…a charming narrative.”—Melinda Bargreen, The Seattle Times
“The author has done a wealth of research in pursuit of his new passion, and he writes engagingly…this intrepid writer has worked hard to interest readers in his musical obsession, and there is a great deal to chew on here.”—Priscilla S. Taylor, he Washington Times
“It’s not often that one begins reading a book with mild interest and then can’t put it down, which happened to me with this beautiful book.”—Diana Athill, author of Stet and Somewhere Towards the End
“…pitch-perfect…The Cello Suites is, on all counts, a superior book.”
-QWF McAuslan First Book Prize Jury citation
“…an ambitious, carefully researched, and inventively constructed book written with clarity and verve.”—Mavis Gallant Prize for Nonfiction Jury Citation
“A delightfully quirky quest…Eric Siblin seamlessly weaves together the tale of how Bach’s lost and mostly forgotten manuscript came to be discovered a century later by Pablo Casals, and finally became Siblin’s personal passion.”—Governor General’s Literary Award Jury Citation
“A book of extraordinary charm, insight, and widespread literary appeal.”—BC National Award for Canadian Nonfiction Jury Citation
“Siblin firmly believes ‘Bach is what you make of him’—and his book represents just that…No matter what the great composer means to readers, they will surely enjoy Siblin’s fun, fast-paced journey from pop-music scribbler to Bach aficionado.”—Christian Science Monitor
“A book that will fascinate anyone who loves Bach’s music. . .engaging. . .Many of the facts woven into textual fabric glitter like metal threads as Siblin shifts the reader’s focus from one protagonist to the other. The result are rich depictions of Bach in his 18th-century milieu and Casals in his 20th-century sphere. . . The author’s colorful prose conveys substantial charm, and reveals a first-rate travel writer’s sense of place. . .sets biographical and musicological details neatly in context.”—David Lander, Stereophile
Most helpful customer reviews
75 of 81 people found the following review helpful.
A wonderful voyage of musical and personal discovery
By S. McGee
When Eric Siblin wandered into a classical musical recital one day in Toronto, he was unaware that the music he would hear would transform his life. On the program were the solo suites for cello by Johann Sebastian Bach, and Siblin, a onetime rock/pop music critic, is blown away by a kind of music he had never heard before, consciously, and might never have deliberately sought out.
This book, the chronicle of series of musical and personal journeys of discovery revolving around the Bach cello suites, is the result. It immediately appealed to me because of my own love for the music -- although unlike Siblin, I'm not a musician of any kind and unlike him, 'classical' music has always been a part of my life. But I kept reading because of my own fascination with Siblin's tale and the way he has chosen to tell it: weaving together three separate strands of a narrative in much the same way that Bach might have woven together musical themes to produce the final work. The first of these strands revolves around Bach himself; the composer's background and how the history of his compositions can be tied to his own life and experiences in a variety of German princely courts of the 18th century. The second is the lifelong love affair between the 13-year-old Pablo Casals (a future superstar cellist), who stumbled across the then almost-unknown cello suites in the back streets of Barcelona, and the music that have ended up becoming some of Bach's best-known and most-loved works. (Without Casals, the suites could have languished in obscurity, rarely played; now they are a part of the cello repertoire that most cellists aspire to perform.) Finally, there is Siblin's own quest to discover more about both Bach and Casals, as part of the process of coming to grips with his own unexpected fascination with the music.
I fell in love with this book both for the caliber of the writing (which is very high indeed) as well as the subject matter. Because Siblin doesn't stick rigidly to discussing Bach and the cello suites themselves, he doesn't get bogged down in the kind of musicological detail that would lose him part of his audience (me amongst them, despite my love for this music, of which I possess three different interpretations...) What appealed to me most is that it's the kind of book that at its heart addresses the enduring impact of great art of any kind has to fascinate its audience, whether those that seek it out (as I did) or stumble upon it (as Siblin did.) At its heart, this is the story of how a piece of music can endure over the centuries and appeal to very different people in wildly different countries and time periods, in contexts its composer couldn't even have imagined.
Definitely an early contender for my favorite book of 2010.... and highly recommended to anyone with even a passing interest in classical music or the arts. And you'll enjoy it twice as much if you listen to each section (the book is broken into sections and movements that mirror those of the cello suites) alongside the music itself.
55 of 65 people found the following review helpful.
An enthusiastic and entertaining sermon from a fresh convert
By Olly Buxton
A philosophy lecturer of mine once remarked that the recently converted make the most passionate fundamentalists. Eric Siblin, a professedly retired rock critic (I'm not sure how one "retires" from a pastime) makes a good example. Stumbling across a performance of Bach's Cello Suites some years ago, Siblin was captivated, converted, and has since leapt into the study and exploration of these narrowly (but profoundly) celebrated pieces with great gusto. (Interestingly, I could find none of Siblin's rock criticism online anywhere. I was curious to see how good it was.)
Being no more familiar than Siblin was with the Cello Suites, I bought myself a recording (Pierre Fournier's) and had it on high rotation while I read. For fellow neophytes, then, these are pieces for an unaccompanied tenor instrument that itself usually (but not always) fulfills the role of an accompaniment to a "treble" instrument like a violin. Bach's six Cello Suites span a couple of hours, and you'd be forgiven for supposing that it would be, therefore, a challenging listen. First go-round, for a non-enthusiast, it is. I must say, though, that having listened to it repeatedly over a week I find it bouncing uncontrollably - and pleasingly - around my head all day. But all the same, I don't think I'm ready to jettison Led Zeppelin just yet. There again, I'm not really the converting type.
At any rate, on account of their inaccessibility the Cello Suites were commonly supposed, for a long while, to be simply rehearsal exercises. Which is where Siblin picks up the story. He explores the Suites in an organised, contrapuntal sort of way, through three lenses, each corresponding to movements in the Suites: firstly Bach's own biography; secondly the musical and political journey of 20th century Cello maestro Pablo Casals, punctuated and framed as it was by the Cello Suites, and thirdly through his own journey, both of discovery of Bach's own music, and through his research for this book. These accounts are interwoven cleverly and playfully and in a way the Baroque master surely would have approved of: according to the structure of the six suites themselves.
The accounts themselves, however, are a little variable.
Bach's biography is patiently and interestingly unfolded. I dare say the genuine aficionado won't find much new or enlightening in Siblin's exposition, but those with a more casual interest will: I hadn't realised, for example, that Bach's life ended in relative obscurity, and that his huge body of work only gained mass appeal long after his death.
And I had never heard of Casals at all. To be sure, Siblin's framing of the Casals story was skillful and its overlay on the cello suites themselves was fascinating. It did feel somewhat wilful: sometimes one can push a construction past the point that it withstands careful examination and I suspect, in his enthusiasm to deliver a pleasing narrative, Siblin has done this. Bach's music might be famous for its almost mathematically careful structure; real life isn't like that. Siblin would have it that Casals, a Catalonian teenager, discovered a publication of the suites and singlehandedly turned the world on to them as a performance piece, and to the cello as a solo instrument. I have a feeling it might not be quite that cut and dried.
The final strand, in which the author himself features, is the weakest. Partly, this is because Siblin himself is a neophyte; he isn't trained or steeped in the classical tradition (part of his story is his attempt to overcome that by taking cello lessons) and hence he has no particular locus standi to back his wild-eyed exegesis of the music, which just winds up sounding like fodder for pseud's corner in Private Eye. It just isn't interesting hearing about a random Canadian's attempts to learn the cello or sing in a Bach Cantata.
Nor does his agenda help: Siblin goes hunting for an Anti-Semitism which almost certainly was illusory, and then has a whale of a time wrestling with the meagre evidence he does find: for example, the anti-Jewish agenda implicit in Bach's St. John Passion. But if there is such a thing, Bach certainly didn't put it there (St. John did), and by any account, including Siblin's, Bach himself had no interaction, let alone interest, in Judaism at any time in his life, most likely never having even met a Jewish person. Yet still Siblin crowbars it in, allowing a patently 20th century gloss to colour his thinking, even absurdly baulking at singing the word 'schnell' in the Cantata, presumably aggrieved at having to use a word frequently attributed to Gestapo officers in Commando magazine. But 'schnell' is simply the German word for 'fast'.
So a curate's egg: the good parts, however, make this a recommended read for a non-specialist interested in a light and entertaining vista onto one of the more challenging corners of Bach's massive oeuvre.
Olly Buxton
48 of 56 people found the following review helpful.
A good read
By tova
This book is a wonderfully crafted combination of biography, history, musicology, detective story and personal discovery. Like the Suites themselves, it has a variety of themes and moods which in the end all fit together in a most satisfying way to connect the stories of Bach, Casals and the writer's passion for the music.
It's neither a heavy tome nor a heavy read but it is nourishing entertainment
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