WE KNOW so little about him. There is the usual moth-eaten anecdote of the “moonlight manuscript,” the prohibited book of music that the defiant teenage Sebastian, orphaned and living at his older brother’s house, copied note by note in the dark when the house fell silent at night. It’s not bad as far as origin stories go, certainly above average, but not sensational either, and only so well-worn, I feel, because the ledger of juicy biographical detail is so short. Bach’s letters are notoriously dull—a bone-dry archive of to-do lists, instructions, invoices, and complaints against his employers, leading many to speculate (and in some cases declare) that the one unfathomable genius of the High Baroque was something of a bore.
That one famous portrait doesn’t help his case. The wig, the jowls, the double chin, the appropriately furrowed brow… I first saw it in a children’s book on the lives of the great composers (a Christmas gift from my cello teacher), and it was always a page whose jaundiced light I was keen to skip, lest it somehow infect the music I had just begun to love. I think my aversion to the painting had its source less in the odd wish that my heroes be beautiful than in the unpleasant fact that Bach resembled my local priest at the time, Father McGregor—an automaton of a man, perfectly benign, as far as I know, compared to his more sinister colleagues in the broader Church of Rome, but one who abused us all the same with the sheer tedium of his voice, the rote torture of his sermons, his half-dead hunch at the altar. I credit his Sunday performances not only for my mother’s crisis of faith, but also for my annulled attraction to the pageantry of Catholic ritual, which didn’t last very long beyond the first stale wafer.
WE DO know, however, that Bach’s insubordinate phase lasted well into adulthood. We know that, in his first job as an organist in Arnstadt, he got caught inviting a “strange maiden” to the church loft. We know that, despite his solemn duty to cultivate sobriety and
