The True Life of J.S. Bach By Klaus Eidam, translated by Hoyt
Rogers Basic. 432 pp. $35 Nicht Bach, sondern Meer sein!
Beethoven’s famous pun on Johann Sebastian Bach’s last name
(“not a Brook, but rather an Ocean!”) is perhaps the most
eloquent summary of the Saxon composer’s importance to music. He
was widely regarded as the greatest keyboard artist of his age,
and his compositions, although not as well known, were deeply
respected by his musical peers. His sons (and his students) were
the greatest composers of the succeeding generation, serving
courts in Hamburg, Berlin, and London. Mozart, who probably
never before had been confronted with a genius equal to his own,
was stunned into silence when he came across Bach’s motets
during a visit to Leipzig. As a boy Beethoven was instructed out
of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, and Chopin began his day with
devotional playings of those same preludes and fugues.
Mendelssohn’s earliest string symphonies were elegies to Bach,
and Brahms devoted much of his career to