The Cello Suites: J. S. Bach, Pablo Casals, and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece

by Eric Siblin

Book Overview

One evening, after ending a stint as a pop music critic, Eric Siblin attended a performance of Bach s Cello Suites. There, something unlikely happened: he fell deeply in love with the music. So began a 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 disappearance...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802119298
• ISBN13: 9780802119292
• Release Date: December 2009
• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 0.91 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.5" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

A glimpse of heaven for the bookworm and the music lover

This book is like a dream come true. I have ordered the CD of the six suites and can hardly wait to spend my late night end of day reading time reading The Cello Suites while listening to them at the same time. In this modern world of noise, electronic intrusion into our personal lives, and the terrible noise of politics that surround us, having a book like this is surely a sort of miracle. I would recommend this book to anyone who loves serious music. I would go so far as to suggest this book as a gift to a young person to give them a small taste of what is available to us outside the pop music scene.

An Informed Newbie's View of a Classic

It is hard for me to imagine Bach's Cello Suites as absent from my collection of CDs, or from the records that I used to have, or, for that matter, from the role of standards within the huge Bach oeuvre. They are beautiful, jaunty, sad, and puzzling, and meet anyone's definition of fine classical music. The truth is, though, that they dropped away from the world's musical knowledge (only partly because the world was slow to understand how much Bach had given it) and really didn't surface until the twentieth century, when Pablo Casals resurrected them. Even then, they didn't make any impression on music critic Eric Siblin. That's not surprising. Siblin had been a pop music critic in Montreal, "a job that had filled my head with vast amounts of music, much of which I didn't want to be there." Still, in 2000 idle curiosity led him to a performance of the suites, mostly because he chanced to be in a hotel near the recital hall. The performance was a revelation: "music more earthy and ecstatic than anything I'd ever heard." In _The Cello Suites: J. S. Bach, Pablo Casals, and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece_ (Atlantic Monthly Press), Sibling tells the welcome stories of the composer, the performer, and his own growth in understanding of the suites. Part of his "search" is literally for Bach's lost original score for them; that's OK, but it won't ruin your appreciation of the book to know that if he had found the original, there would have been international headlines about the discovery. The better part of the search is his growing musical appreciation and fondness for the suites, and for their historical lore. Bach was not a musical sensation in his own lifetime. His own contemporary Handel was far more famous, and Bach never approached the sort of superstardom that Mozart or Beethoven would attain. After his death, it was the sons that got the manuscripts of his work. There are stories that some of his handwritten pages went to the padding to wrap around fruit trees, or in a shop for wrapping cheese, or even as detritus in a New York City construction site. The original manuscript of the Cello Suites has never turned up. Bach's wife sometime around 1730 made a copy of the original manuscript to give to a violinist. Her copy went from one musician to another, winding up in a royal library in Berlin in 1841, where it was mostly ignored. The thinking seemed to be that the suites were perhaps technical exercises for cellists, not performable pieces. Then in 1890, Pablo Casals, thirteen years old and a prodigy, was looking for music to play, rummaging through a sheet music store in Barcelona. A tattered copy of the suites caught his eye; he had not known that they existed. They were to change his life. He practiced them every day (a routine he would keep up during his long life), but it was twelve years before he would perform them in public. Casals, in exile from Spain, refused to play in countries that recognized Franco's g

What a wonderful journey

I found this book in a bookstore and started reading the first few pages. The narrative grabbed me immediately. I'm a cellist, and have learned a couple of the suites, and have always enjoyed the suites. This book finds a way to tell the story of three people and their journeys, and how the Suites intersect with their lives: Bach as the composer, Casals as the evangelist and performance standard-setter, and the author as a pop music writer with little knowledge of classical music, as he discovers the Suites, and experiences life-altering changes as a result of this discovery. The book is thoroughly researched, and the book is full if wonderful details about Bach and Casals. The tone remains conversational throughout, making the book much more colorful and interesting than most books about classical music. As a result of this book, I've been pulling out all of my recordings of the suites, hearing them in new ways, and comparing the different performances I have in my collection. The suites are truly great pieces of music, and The Cello Suites manages to build a narrative just as soulful and colorful as its subject.

History of how the Cello Suites were composed, discovered and performed

Eric Siblin explores the history of how each of the six Bach Cello was first composed, discovered or performed. To accomplish this task, the author goes back and forth between the lives of Johann Sebastian Bach and Pablo Casals, the 20th century Catalan cellist who first performed, recorded and popularized the suites. Siblin paints a very compelling picture of life in both Baroque Germany and 20th century Spain and interweaves the history of music with the tumultuous events that defined both time periods. For that reason alone, this book is worth reading. For a cellist, musicologist or a person interested in music history this book is a masterpiece. It is easy to read and difficult to put down making it ideal either for someone just starting to learn about the history of western classical music or someone well-versed in the subject. It goes into alot of detail about the history and composition of each suite without ever seeming overly technical. Perhaps most importantly, this book explores why the Bach Cello Suites became such importnt and well known reportiore for cellists today. Surprisingly, they were relatively unknown in their time and Bach left no clear date for their composition or instructions for how to perform them aside from typical Baroque techniques. The mystery surrounding their origin leaves plenty of room for interpretation on the parts of cellists who have come to know and love them which Siblin adroitly makes clear for the reader.

A wonderful voyage of musical and personal discovery

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

A good read

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