The theme of this provocative little book is: "Jewish rock music critic meets German Lutheran Baroque composer." I am not making this up.
The author, Eric Siblin, is a former pop music critic for the Montreal Gazette. After submerging himself in countless rock and pop concerts, Siblin concluded that the "Top 40 tunes had overstayed their welcome in [his] auditory cortex, and the culture surrounding rock music had worn thin." He discovered, to his eternal gratitude, that the Cello Suites of J. S. Bach "offered a way out of the jam." By choosing Bach over a Bono concert one fateful autumn evening in 2000, Siblin embarked on an almost decade-long obsession over what most serious musicologists consider the greatest solo instrumental set ever conceived: Bach's Six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello. It led Siblin from the adolescent world of his Fender guitar to what the renowned Italian cello soloist and conductor Mario Brunello called "the absolute perfection" of Bach's cello suites.
Brunello, by the way, should know what he is talking about–he lugged his cello to the summit of Mt. Fuji in Japan in 2007 just to play selections from the cello suites. As he put it, "At the summit of the mountain, man is closest to God and the absolute. Bach's music comes closest to the absolute and to perfection."
But Siblin's intensely personal journey through the life and work of Bach (and the fascinating rediscovery of the cello suites in the twentieth century by the brilliant Spaniard Pablo Casals) does not overshadow the profound revelatory gem offered by this thin work, namely, that there are people within the inner sanctum of pop culture looking for a back door to escape the grind of largely superficial and transient popular musical forms. One wonders if there are legions of seekers like Siblin who can follow the eastern star of Bach's cello suites to the Babe in the Manger as preached by Bach in his Christmas cantatas.
In Bach's Six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello, Siblin finds out why the renowned Russian cellist Mischa Maisky called them his "personal Bible," why Casals began each day with them, why Yo-Yo Ma commissioned six films to accompany them, why they have been played at weddings, at tributes to 9/11, and in parlors, academic town halls, taverns, and cathedrals throughout the world, and why the late columnist-author-Bach aficionado William F. Buckley, Jr. argued that Bach would still be considered the greatest composer in music history, even if he died before going to Leipzig in 1723 (but after composing the cello suites) and before writing his two-hundred-plus known cantatas, three known passions, and the cosmic Mass in B Minor. The cello suites happen to fall into that exact slot just before Bach left the Calvinist prince of Cothen for the high Lutheran orthodoxy of Leipzig.
This book does not offer anything particularly new or startling about Bach or the development of this monumental instrumental work. Its technical difficulty is legendary–one needs to know no more on this topic than that Casals (a skilled and internationally acclaimed solo cellist) practiced it daily for twelve years before attempting it in public. If Siblin's bibliography is indicative of anything, the author may not even be familiar with the works of the basic biographers of Bach such as Whittaker, Geiringer, Terry, Leaver, or Stiller. That matters little. Siblin steers largely clear of committing a much deeper and more significant mortal sin. While showing he is familiar with the worn-out attempt to connect Bach to an effort to impregnate his manuscripts with cabalistic numerological signs (i.e., Bach as the glazed-eyed mystic trying to build in subliminal, and usually egotistical, numeric codes into every measure), and Bach's supposed rampant anti-Semitism "evidenced" in his reliance on St. John the Eyewitness as the text for the passion of that name, Siblin zeroes in on the sheer power and organic perfection of the high art and aesthetics found in Bach that pushes the sensitive listener in awe to the foot of Mt. Sinai and then to the foot of Mt. Calvary. More remarkable than that, the Jewish Siblin treats Bach's Lutheran orthodoxy with serious regard, which is more than one can say for theological liberals such as the supposedly Lutheran Albert Schweitzer of the last century (with Lutheran friends like that, one needs no enemies) or even many current Bach scholars (such as Harvard's Christoph Wolff) who consider Bach's Lutheranism an embarrassing vestige of pre-Enlightenment religiosity.
This book makes two terribly important points, one unintentionally apologetical and the other one intentionally theological.
First, the apologetical point: The original manuscripts of all six suites have been lost. Siblin spends substantial time tracing the possible whereabouts of the original works (if there is any glaring weakness with Siblin, it is surely found in his tendency to enjoy engaging in speculation, but he at least labels it as such and steers that bus away from the inevitable intellectual ditch it goes into with other authors). That, however, has not resulted in historical scholars casting doubt on the cello suites nor has it created any concern with dating the suites to approximately 1720. The connection to biblical authorship and dating could not be clearer. While higher critics muse as to authorship and dating of the Gospels based on non-textual philosophical speculations, centering their claims on the use of phantom documents such as "Q," the fact is that the absence of original manuscripts has presented no problem whatsoever for authorship and dating of the biblical documents. Our copies of the gospel records, for example, come so early and in such magnitude and quality as to eliminate any serious doubt they were written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The four Gospel writers are either eyewitnesses of the events they transcribe (Matthew and John) or they record the efforts of the closest associates of eyewitnesses (Mark and Luke) who sifted through the "many infallible proofs" that these events in fact happened exactly as set forth.
This is why experienced trial lawyers investigating the manuscript trail of the Gospels inevitably end up concluding that those foundational four books alone are clearly primary source material and are the best attested works of all antiquity (see John Warwick Montgomery, Lord Hailsham, Edwin Bennet, Simon Greenleaf, Hugo Grotius, and Sir Norman Anderson).
Second, this book makes an important theological statement as to where Bach's music inevitably leads the serious unbeliever. Siblin finds that Bach's commitment to perfecting his art to the fullest of all his substantial gifts (despite having twenty children and more professional responsibilities than any five megachurch pastors combined) took Siblin down this path:
When I was practicing alone in my Bach shed [note: Siblin actually began to take cello lessons during his born-again experience with Bach], with fifty-odd amateurs doing the same elsewhere, each in their own way trying their best to nail the music, it struck me as amazing how much this one individual has given to posterity. How many children and students, professionals and amateurs, virtuosos and maestros, not to mention listeners, have done what we were doing for three hundred years, trying to master something purely aesthetic, trying to break a code that connects us to something greater, more accomplished, more perfect than ourselves. I'm not sure what that something is.
I think Siblin has a pretty good start on finding out what that "something" is.
May Siblin's tribe indeed increase. He is an Israelite in whom there is no guile. He admits to Bach's choral works being "challenging to twenty-first century ears" because of some decidedly "downbeat lyrics" such as these noted by Siblin and found in Cantata No. 179:
My sins sicken me
Like pus in my bones;
Help me, Jesus, Lamb of God
For I am sinking in deepest slime.
If the God of creativity can use cello suites based on French dance forms to lead a Jewish rock music critic to the foot of the holy Mt. Sinai, may it also lead him and a legion of others to the foot of a cross raised atop another holy mountain where the only begotten Son of the Father died for the "pus" of J. S. Bach and indeed for the "pus" of the whole world.
