---
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title: "Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven"
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# Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven

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Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven [Gardiner, John Eliot] on desertcart.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven

Review: A Brilliant Musician with a Life as Complex as His Music - My grandfather was an organist. As a boy growing up in Slovenia, he practiced in every spare moment and in his teenage years was already directing music at his church. When communist forces showed up in his village to purge the ranks of able-bodied men my grandfather stood in line and watched men and boys loaded into the back of a military transport which would eventually deposit them in mass graves hidden in the woods and far from scrutiny. When he was finally at the front of the line he was briefly interrogated at gunpoint. “And you, boy, what is your occupation?” He answered confidently and honestly, “I am a musician. An organist. I play the music of God.” His inquisitor lowered his rifle and gestured him away. “Go, then. Go and play God’s music as if it were for your life and salvation.” This is precisely what my grandfather would do. He was hidden among the nuns at a local parish until he was able to escape Slovenia through miles-long crude tunnels in the mountains. Through displaced persons camps and further arduous travels, he continued to pursue his music however possible knowing that it not only granted a brief reprieve to those around him, but that his very life had been spared so that he might honor his God with his talents. He would spend years hidden away as a refugee in Gratz, Austria where he had access to a beautiful pipe organ and could play rapturous music in times fraught with violence. Eventually he would immigrate to United States and continue to play music as though it were the very basis of his salvation. I grew up lurking in the choir loft of his old San Francisco church where he would direct music for over 50 years. I was fascinated to watch his hands move like lightning switching from one manual of his organ to the next, pulling out stops, simultaneously directing the chorus of voices to his left with jerking flat-handed darts of his wrist between chords. His feet kicked out booming bass notes that rattled my chest. It was a beautiful harmony of dexterity, practice, and brilliantly written music (much of it composed by my grandfather himself). I loved the complexity, depth, warmth, and variety that he could conjure from a single instrument. In college, I took an introductory music history course and was thrilled when the teacher played Bach’s Fugue in G-Minor (BMV 578). In the few short minutes that the song played I was transported back to those days in the choir loft and to my grandfather sitting straight backed at his piano practicing Bach’s music again and again until it was perfect. But this short piece of music was so complex with overlapping melodies played in overlapping rounds with hands and feet. I was enraptured and eager to explore Bach’s music further. What started as a love of his organ works expanded as I came to appreciate his versatility. In Bach’s St. Matthew and St. John Passions I felt his brilliance on full display and suspected that he too may have found his salvation on a bench seat with his fingers poised over the keys of his organ which contained limitless possibilities. Turning to the book at hand, I was fascinated to learn more about the man himself. The book is impeccably and carefully researched--with somewhat scant biographical information, the author is careful to indicate what might be speculation and what is solid detail--for example extensive correspondence regarding remuneration, which was critically important for Bach (understandable for a man who fathered somewhere in the range of 20 children). Bach’s life was a struggle and his temper often taciturn, but his music transported him to another realm. His extraordinary talents as a performer actually scared a rival musician out of the city when a keyboardists’ duel was proposed. This book tends toward the technical at times and can get bogged down in financial details, but the author does well to keep the story moving along and it is fascinating to listen to the music Bach was composing while tracing the twists and turns of his personal life and career. Much like Bach’s music, this book has merit for its technical achievement alone. It is complex, composed with care, and has moments of pure beauty. Regarding Bach’s life, I am left with the impression of a man with an artists’ temperament who was driven to excel and gifted with mathematical and musical genius. The similarities to my grandfather are uncanny and reading this book helped me to connect not only with the life of this great composer, but also to my own story. B Oh, Bach also wrote an awesome little song about coffee: Ah! How sweet coffee tastes More delicious than a thousand kisses Milder than muscatel wine. Coffee, I have to have coffee, And, if someone wants to pamper me, Ah, then bring me coffee as a gift!
Review: John Eliot in the Castle of Heaven - I do not mean to derogate from Sir John Eliot Gardiner's status as one of the great luminaries of the podium in our age--to say nothing of his status as a pioneer and perfecter of period performance practice--but in the end the capstone of his career might well turn out to have been in the medium of prose rather than musical performance! This is, quite simply, the most fascinating, engrossing, erudite and stunningly written work on the Leipzig Cantor available. Too bad it focuses primarily on his sacred music (I would love to have Gardiner's obiter dicta on many of the keyboard, chamber and orchestral works treated only tangentially here); but within that limited scope, Gardiner has achieved something quite remarkable: a work of musical historiography that manages to combine rigorous scholarship with philosophical acumen and literary flair. As a philosopher with a keen interest in the interface between aesthetics and religion, I particularly appreciated Gardiner's thorough understanding of the exigencies of church music within the Lutheran tradition, and his situating of tht tradition within the larger framework of Church history, scriptural exegesis and Christian spirituality. His effort to discern Bach's character and aspirations from his church music rather than principally from the documentary evidence (which is relaitvely meager) fixes the reader's (and listener's) attention where it must always begin and end--namely, with the scores themselves, as performed and heard. His charting of Bach's creative development, through the seasons and struggles of his career calls our attention anew to the status of the sacred music--particularly the Cantatas--as a kind of spiritual journal recounting the consolations and desolations of a fragile, fallible genius who also happened to be something of a mystic. For Gardiner, in the end, Bach's sacred-musical testament amounts to the bravest and most brilliant of stands against the depredations of our human condition at its most terrifying--and *for* the transcendence to the rapture of creativity fitfully but effectually points. I cannot recommend this work highly enough. Its pages will afford a fresh encounter with the composer, even if you have been studying his works and his commentators (as I have) for nearly a lifetime. But even more tellingly perhaps, you will encounter John Eliot Gardiner in a new way--as an accomplished writer and winsomely humane scholar.

## Technical Specifications

| Specification | Value |
|---------------|-------|
| Best Sellers Rank | #351,235 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #32 in Classical Musician Biographies #162 in Theatre Biographies #359 in Music History & Criticism (Books) |
| Customer Reviews | 4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars (725) |
| Dimensions  | 6 x 1.4 x 9.1 inches |
| Edition  | Reprint |
| ISBN-10  | 1400031435 |
| ISBN-13  | 978-1400031436 |
| Item Weight  | 1.96 pounds |
| Language  | English |
| Print length  | 672 pages |
| Publication date  | March 3, 2015 |
| Publisher  | Vintage |

## Images

![Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/81QyJr0dCUL.jpg)

## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ A Brilliant Musician with a Life as Complex as His Music
*by P***F on October 15, 2020*

My grandfather was an organist. As a boy growing up in Slovenia, he practiced in every spare moment and in his teenage years was already directing music at his church. When communist forces showed up in his village to purge the ranks of able-bodied men my grandfather stood in line and watched men and boys loaded into the back of a military transport which would eventually deposit them in mass graves hidden in the woods and far from scrutiny. When he was finally at the front of the line he was briefly interrogated at gunpoint. “And you, boy, what is your occupation?” He answered confidently and honestly, “I am a musician. An organist. I play the music of God.” His inquisitor lowered his rifle and gestured him away. “Go, then. Go and play God’s music as if it were for your life and salvation.” This is precisely what my grandfather would do. He was hidden among the nuns at a local parish until he was able to escape Slovenia through miles-long crude tunnels in the mountains. Through displaced persons camps and further arduous travels, he continued to pursue his music however possible knowing that it not only granted a brief reprieve to those around him, but that his very life had been spared so that he might honor his God with his talents. He would spend years hidden away as a refugee in Gratz, Austria where he had access to a beautiful pipe organ and could play rapturous music in times fraught with violence. Eventually he would immigrate to United States and continue to play music as though it were the very basis of his salvation. I grew up lurking in the choir loft of his old San Francisco church where he would direct music for over 50 years. I was fascinated to watch his hands move like lightning switching from one manual of his organ to the next, pulling out stops, simultaneously directing the chorus of voices to his left with jerking flat-handed darts of his wrist between chords. His feet kicked out booming bass notes that rattled my chest. It was a beautiful harmony of dexterity, practice, and brilliantly written music (much of it composed by my grandfather himself). I loved the complexity, depth, warmth, and variety that he could conjure from a single instrument. In college, I took an introductory music history course and was thrilled when the teacher played Bach’s Fugue in G-Minor (BMV 578). In the few short minutes that the song played I was transported back to those days in the choir loft and to my grandfather sitting straight backed at his piano practicing Bach’s music again and again until it was perfect. But this short piece of music was so complex with overlapping melodies played in overlapping rounds with hands and feet. I was enraptured and eager to explore Bach’s music further. What started as a love of his organ works expanded as I came to appreciate his versatility. In Bach’s St. Matthew and St. John Passions I felt his brilliance on full display and suspected that he too may have found his salvation on a bench seat with his fingers poised over the keys of his organ which contained limitless possibilities. Turning to the book at hand, I was fascinated to learn more about the man himself. The book is impeccably and carefully researched--with somewhat scant biographical information, the author is careful to indicate what might be speculation and what is solid detail--for example extensive correspondence regarding remuneration, which was critically important for Bach (understandable for a man who fathered somewhere in the range of 20 children). Bach’s life was a struggle and his temper often taciturn, but his music transported him to another realm. His extraordinary talents as a performer actually scared a rival musician out of the city when a keyboardists’ duel was proposed. This book tends toward the technical at times and can get bogged down in financial details, but the author does well to keep the story moving along and it is fascinating to listen to the music Bach was composing while tracing the twists and turns of his personal life and career. Much like Bach’s music, this book has merit for its technical achievement alone. It is complex, composed with care, and has moments of pure beauty. Regarding Bach’s life, I am left with the impression of a man with an artists’ temperament who was driven to excel and gifted with mathematical and musical genius. The similarities to my grandfather are uncanny and reading this book helped me to connect not only with the life of this great composer, but also to my own story. B Oh, Bach also wrote an awesome little song about coffee: Ah! How sweet coffee tastes More delicious than a thousand kisses Milder than muscatel wine. Coffee, I have to have coffee, And, if someone wants to pamper me, Ah, then bring me coffee as a gift!

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ John Eliot in the Castle of Heaven
*by J***S on January 9, 2014*

I do not mean to derogate from Sir John Eliot Gardiner's status as one of the great luminaries of the podium in our age--to say nothing of his status as a pioneer and perfecter of period performance practice--but in the end the capstone of his career might well turn out to have been in the medium of prose rather than musical performance! This is, quite simply, the most fascinating, engrossing, erudite and stunningly written work on the Leipzig Cantor available. Too bad it focuses primarily on his sacred music (I would love to have Gardiner's obiter dicta on many of the keyboard, chamber and orchestral works treated only tangentially here); but within that limited scope, Gardiner has achieved something quite remarkable: a work of musical historiography that manages to combine rigorous scholarship with philosophical acumen and literary flair. As a philosopher with a keen interest in the interface between aesthetics and religion, I particularly appreciated Gardiner's thorough understanding of the exigencies of church music within the Lutheran tradition, and his situating of tht tradition within the larger framework of Church history, scriptural exegesis and Christian spirituality. His effort to discern Bach's character and aspirations from his church music rather than principally from the documentary evidence (which is relaitvely meager) fixes the reader's (and listener's) attention where it must always begin and end--namely, with the scores themselves, as performed and heard. His charting of Bach's creative development, through the seasons and struggles of his career calls our attention anew to the status of the sacred music--particularly the Cantatas--as a kind of spiritual journal recounting the consolations and desolations of a fragile, fallible genius who also happened to be something of a mystic. For Gardiner, in the end, Bach's sacred-musical testament amounts to the bravest and most brilliant of stands against the depredations of our human condition at its most terrifying--and *for* the transcendence to the rapture of creativity fitfully but effectually points. I cannot recommend this work highly enough. Its pages will afford a fresh encounter with the composer, even if you have been studying his works and his commentators (as I have) for nearly a lifetime. But even more tellingly perhaps, you will encounter John Eliot Gardiner in a new way--as an accomplished writer and winsomely humane scholar.

### ⭐⭐⭐ Review
*by P***L on September 2, 2025*

This is not a Deckle Edge paperback edition as stated in the Product Description.

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