The Cello Suites
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
One autumn evening, not long after ending a stint as a rock music critic, Eric Siblin attended a recital of Johann Sebastian Bach's Cello Suites. There, in a spine-tingling moment, something unlikely happened: he fell deeply in love with the music, and had to hear more, know more. So began an epic quest that would unravel three centuries of mystery, intrigue, history, politics and passion.The result has the power to obsess readers in the way the Cello Suites enthrall listeners and players alike; part biography, part music history, and part literary mystery, the book follows three strands of an evolving story. The first is a dramatic narrative featuring Johann Sebastian Bach and a missing manuscript from the eighteenth century; the second is a key discovery by Pablo Casals in Spain and his rise to fame; and the third is Eric Siblin's own discovery of, and infatuation with, The Cello Suites, which takes him to the back streets of Barcelona, a Belgian mansion, and a bombed-out German palace; to interviews with cellists Mischa Maisky, Anner Bylsma, and Pieter Wispelwey; to archives, festivals, conferences, and cemeteries; and even to cello lessons - all in pursuit of uncovering the mysteries that continue to haunt this piece of music more than 250 years after the composer's death.The Cello Suites is an incomparable, beautifully written, true journey of discovery, fuelled and inspired by the transcendent power of a musical masterpiece.'This is one of the most extraordinary, clever, beautiful, and impeccably researched books I have read in years.' - Simon Winchester (author of The Surgeon of Crowthorne)
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.
