Re: Glenn Gould in "The True Life of J.S. Bach"

[Karl Berry <karl@freefriends.org>]

    Has anyone read "The True Life of J.S. Bach" by Klaus Eidam?

I tried but couldn't get through it.  I gave up around the time he blew
up the nanny-goat bassoonist episode into a full-fledged psychological
analysis of how dominant Bach was, or something like that.

All in all, he seemed quite arrogant and disrespectful of the incredible
amounts of work that his predecessors had put in.  Sure, they were tied
to their own time and their conceptions of JSB (just as we are), but
that's no reason to be downright nasty, as it seemed to me he was.

If anyone wants to get the same updating of Bach musicology without all
the sound and fury, I highly highly recommend Christoph Wolff's books
(Bach: Essays on his Life and Music, which especially concentrates on
the later works; and Bach: The Learned Musician, which is a full-fledged
biography even though Wolff doesn't like to call it that :)

Even Eidam grudgingly admitted that Wolff was a pretty decent writer and
analyst, at least so far as I read.  Maybe he slams Wolff later on.

Gould's Bach is equivalent to Czerny exercises?  If I had gotten that
far that would *definitely* have been the killer :).

Peace,
karl