The Cello Suites: J. S. Bach, Pablo Casals, and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

Eric Siblin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 15, 2009

One evening, not long after ending a stint as the pop music critic at the Montreal Gazette, Eric Siblin attended a recital of Johann Sebastian Bach's "Cello Suites." There, something unlikely happened: he fell deeply in love with the music. So began an epic quest that would unravel three centuries of intrigue, politics, and passion. Part biography, part music history, and part mystery, The Cello Suites weaves together three dramatic narratives: Bach's composition of the suites and the manuscript's subsequent disappearance in the eighteenth century; Pablo Casals's historic discovery of the music in Spain in the late nineteenth century, and his popularization of the suites several decades later; and Siblin's own infatuation with the suites at the dawn of the twenty-first century. His search to learn all he can about the music leads Siblin to Barcelona, where Pablo Casals, just thirteen and in possession of his first cello, roamed the back streets with his father, in search of sheet music. To their amazement, they found Bach's lost "Cello Suites" tucked in a dark corner. Casals would play the suites every day for twelve years before finally performing them in public--and making them his own. As Siblin pursues the mysteries that continue to haunt this music more than 250 years after its composer's death, he asks the questions that have stumped modern scholars: why did Bach compose the suites for the cello, which was considered a lowly instrument in his day? And what happened to the original manuscript of the suites, which vanished after being hastily copied by Bach's second wife? The Cello Suites is a journey of discovery, fueled by the transcendent power of a musical masterpiece--and of the listeners who, like Siblin, have loved it through the ages.

Editorial Reviews

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

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press (December 15, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802119298
• ISBN-13: 978-0802119292
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (35 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #291,702 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #7 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > People, A-Z > ( B ) > Bach, Johann Sebastian
  • #22 in Books > Arts & Photography > Performing Arts > Dance > Ballet
  • #74 in Books > Arts & Photography > Music > Theory, Composition & Performance > Sheet Music & Scores > Forms & Genres > Ballet & Dance

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

63 of 67 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A wonderful voyage of musical and personal discovery, January 2, 2010

By 

S. McGee (New York, NY) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Cello Suites: J. S. Bach, Pablo Casals, and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece (Hardcover)

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.

38 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars An enthusiastic and entertaining sermon from a fresh convert, September 17, 2010

By 

O. Buxton "Olly Buxton" (Highgate, UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Cello Suites: J. S. Bach, Pablo Casals, and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece (Hardcover)

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

41 of 48 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A good read, April 21, 2009

By 

tova - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Cello Suites: J.S. Bach, Pablo Casals, and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece (Hardcover)

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