Gardiner’s book, a vividly written volume that appeared in 2013, tries to fill in some of the gaps. We see Bach emerging from a society still traumatized by the Thirty Years’ War and by outbreaks of plague. Life expectancy was around thirty. In the Thuringian town of Eisenach, where Bach was born, quasi-pagan notions of devilry still prevailed. Bach’s education would have been doctrinaire and reactionary. “History is nothing but the demonstration of Christian truth,” one popular textbook said. Gardiner highlights German research that notes rampant ruffianism among Eisenach’s youth and a troubling trend of “brutalization of the boys.” Gardiner may go too far in characterizing Bach as a “reformed teenage thug,” but the young composer is known to have drawn a dagger in the midst of an altercation with a bassoonist.

Thuggish or not, Bach immersed himself in music at an early age, as had generations of Bachs before him. An obituary prepared by Bach’s son Carl Philipp Emanuel speaks of his father’s “unheard-of zeal in studying.” That claim is buttressed by a discovery made a decade ago, of the teen-aged Bach’s precociously precise copies of organ pieces by Reincken and Buxtehude. His life was destined to unfold in a constricted area. The towns and cities where he spent his career—Arnstadt, Mühlhausen, Weimar, Cöthen, and Leipzig—can be seen in a few hours’ driving around central and eastern Germany. But his lifelong habit of studying and copying scores allowed him to roam the Europe of the mind. In his later years, he copied everything from a Renaissance mass by Palestrina to the up-to-date Italianate lyricism of Pergolesi. Bach became an absolute master of his art by never ceasing to be a student of it.

His most exalted sacred works—the two extant Passions, from the seventeen-twenties, and the Mass in B Minor, completed not long before his death, in 1750—are feats of synthesis, mobilizing secular devices to spiritual ends. They are rooted in archaic chants, hymns, and chorales. They honor, with consummate skill, the scholastic discipline of canon and fugue. They make expert use of the word-painting techniques of the Renaissance madrigal and Baroque opera. They absorb such stock scenes as the lament, the pastoral, the lullaby, the rage aria, the tempest. They allude to courtly French dances, Italian love songs, the polonaise. Their furious development of brief motifs anticipates Beethoven, who worshipped Bach when he was young. And their most daring harmonic adventures—for example, the otherworldly modulations in the “Confiteor” of the B-Minor Mass—look ahead to Wagner, even to Schoenberg.

They are works of deep devotion but also of high ambition. Before Bach went to Leipzig, in 1723, he had been contentedly ensconced in Cöthen, some forty miles to the northwest, where a music-loving prince elicited such instrumental tours de force as the first book of the “Well-Tempered Clavier,” the English Suites, and the music for solo violin and solo cello. But the prince was a Calvinist, and had little need of sacred music. Bach evidently saw the Leipzig job as an opportunity to shape the spiritual life of a city. For the first few years, he pursued that project with ferocious energy, composing cantatas on a weekly basis. Gardiner plausibly evokes Bach in his studio, copyists around him, cranking out music at a frenzied pace—a picture “not dissimilar to the backstage activities on a TV or film set.”

For the most part, Leipzig failed to appreciate the effort. Bach was reprimanded for neglecting his teaching duties and for inserting himself into musical and liturgical matters around the city. A member of the town council called him “incorrigible.” The extensive revisions that he made to the St. John Passion in 1725—“Herr, unser Herrscher” was not the only striking section of the score to be cut—were possibly the result of outside interference. The judgment of another composer in 1737 may sum up the conventional wisdom in Leipzig: “This great man would be the admiration of whole nations if he had more agreeableness, if he did not take away the natural element in his pieces by giving them a turgid and confused style, and if he did not darken their beauty by an excess of art.” Bach, for his part, complained in a letter that his experience had been one of “almost continual vexation, envy, and persecution.” Attempts to find a position elsewhere fell short, however, and he remained in Leipzig until his death.

He became a distinguished figure in his final years, his influence felt in many corners of German music, not least because of the activity of his various composing sons. He received the title of Court Composer from the Elector of Saxony and, on a visit to Berlin, astonished Frederick the Great with his improvisations. Still, he had nothing like the celebrity of his contemporary Handel. According to Carl Philipp Emanuel, Bach twice tried to arrange a meeting with Handel, but the latter contrived to make himself unavailable. The implication is that Handel felt threatened. The anecdote gives a poignant glimpse of Bach’s personality: he yearned to join the international élite, but the trappings of success were denied him. He made careful copies of the Passions in his last years, which suggests a hope for posthumous vindication, but he could hardly have imagined the repertory culture that came into existence in the nineteenth century. More likely, he simply wanted to prevent his music from vanishing. Some of it did: at least one other Passion, after St. Mark, was lost.

The book that perhaps reveals more of Bach than any other can be found at the Concordia Seminary, in St. Louis. By chance, that organization came into possession of Bach’s copy of Abraham Calov’s three-volume edition of the Bible, which contains Luther’s translation of the Bible alongside commentaries by Luther and Calov. Bach made notes in it and, in 1733, signed his name on the title page of each volume. The marginalia establish the fervor of his belief: no Sunday Christian could have made such acute observations. Bach singles out passages describing music as a vessel of divinity: in one note, he observes that music was “especially ordered by God’s spirit through David,” and in another he writes, “With devotional music, God is always present in his grace.” The annotations also seem to reveal some soul-searching. This passage is marked as important, and is partly underlined: “As far as your person is concerned, you must not get angry with anyone regardless of the injury he may have done to you. But, where your office requires it, there you must get angry.” One can picture Bach struggling to determine whether his “almost continual vexation” stemmed from his person or his office—from vanity or duty.

Yes, Bach believed in God. What is harder to pin down is how he positioned himself among the theological trends of the time. The Pietist movement, which arose in the late seventeenth century, aimed at reinvigorating an orthodox Lutheran establishment that, in its view, had become too rigid. Pietists urged a renewal of personal devotion and a less combative attitude toward rival religious systems, including Judaism. Bach made passing contact with Pietist figures and themes, though he remained aligned with the orthodox wing—not least because Pietists held that music had too prominent a role in church services.

“I see, and have you tried worrying about it?” Facebook

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Bach’s two surviving Passions point to an older doctrinal split. John is the visionary among the Evangelists, his philosophical grandeur evident from the first verse (“In the beginning was the Word”). As Chafe observes, the St. John Passion stresses Jesus’ messianic nature and accentuates oppositions between good and evil. Theologians relate John to the “Christus Victor” conception of Atonement, which dates back to Christianity’s early days, and according to which Christ died on the Cross knowing that his Resurrection would redeem mankind. In Matthew, Jesus has less foreknowledge: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Matthew accords with the other major conception of Atonement, known as the “satisfaction theory,” in which humanity is redeemed through the sacrifice of an utterly blameless person. The opening chorus of the St. Matthew Passion, “Kommt, ihr Töchter, helft mir klagen” (“Come, you daughters, help me mourn”), is an engulfing river of lament, lacking the triumphalism of “Herr, unser Herrscher.” The St. Matthew is the more openhearted, empathetic work; the St. John remains a little frightening.