Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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30 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Really wonderful, 4 Jan 2005
This is a really terrific book about the 18th century, the Enlightenment, Bach, Frederick, and the whole conflict (which seems appropriate right now, at least if you're looking at the States) between Faith and Reason. The author has worked hard to make all the complex subjects involved not only very easy to grasp but actually gripping,and it's one of the most inspiring and educational books I've come across in a long time. Certainly anybody interested in Bach, whose biographies have never really done it for me, should buy this book: It makes him come alive. But more broadly, anybody interested in the history of ideas, music, Europe in the 18th century, or the world we live in today should read this book. I haven't come across a book this good in a very long time.
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26 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Truly worth reading...., 11 Jan 2005
By A Customer
I have been playing Bach all my life, I have read everything about him, and I have never come across a book that brought him so vividly alive. I honestly never knew who he was before this book. I never quite understood the forces that motivated him, why he wrote music as moving as it was, how he could have maintained such integrity in such adverse circumstances (his own sons were against him!), why he was so dismissed during his life. Now I understand that, and so much more. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It changed my view of Bach and in a way my view of why the world we live in is the way it is.
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19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The King and the Composer, 7 Dec 2005
In 1747 there was a famous meeting between Frederick the Great and Bach, at which the king, in a spirit of malice, challenged the composer to write first a three-part and then a six-part a fugue on a theme that seemed an impossible basis for such an exercise. Gaines presents this meeting as a confrontation between the shallow Age of Reason and the profound Age of Faith. It is a promising subject, and there are some fine pages contrasting the philosophies and techniques of the “old-fashioned” music to which Bach was heir with the new galant style which Frederick enjoyed and in which he composed himself. There is also a concluding chapter which discusses the collapse of the faith on Reason and the rise of Romanticism, and how, after many decades of neglect, Bach came into his own again. It is, however, only in fits and starts that this philosophical theme is pursued. For the rest, the book consists of two separate narrative biographies with little contact between them, chapters on Frederick alternating with chapters on Bach. Both men had strong and interesting personalities; and the accounts of their lives are very readable. Readers who have some technical knowledge of music will find the analysis of Bach’s work most illuminating; those who have no such knowledge will find those pages heavy going - but even they will come away with the realization that Bach set down his notes not only to make brilliantly complex pattern but that they were a remarkably “literal” rendering of the philosophical and theological ideas they expressed. Anyone who can follow this analysis will share Gaines’ worship of Bach. As for Frederick, he is hardly someone whom any sane person can worship; but Gaines brings out very well the devastating effect which a terrible childhood had on crippling Frederick as a human being. Although, with its three separate parts (philosophy and two biographies), the book lacks real unity, anyone who is interested in the 18th century will find it very rewarding.
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