![]() ![]() ![]() Bach's supremely ordered music, Gardiner suggests, is engaged in a desperate struggle to keep chaos at bay. And he detects a glint in those fixed, asymmetrical eyes – a hint of the mad exuberance and raging complexity vented in his fugues or in the wild cacophony when the chorus in the St Matthew Passion demands Christ's death. But Gardiner now fastens on the "fleshly lips and jowls" that tell of Bach's partiality for food and drink: severity is countered by sensuality. ![]() The nose is still beaky, and the eyelids have a weary, elderly droop. In Princeton, where the portrait (pictured) is now located, he looks both at it and through it, discerning the character of this most detached and unconfiding of artists. On his way upstairs to bed, the young Gardiner always flinched from the zealot's "forbidding stare".Īt the end of his long book, after a lifetime spent studying and conducting Bach's choral works, Gardiner finally has the courage to return that stern gaze. Gardiner actually grew up under the eye of the bewigged Lutheran cantor: a portrait of him had been entrusted to Gardiner's parents – who raised their brood with sung graces at mealtimes and traditional country dances afterwards – for safekeeping during the war. ![]() B ach might be John Eliot Gardiner's godfather, a few centuries removed. ![]()
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