A lot of it wasn't hugely new information for me but it was fun to revisit. Snuffing out the lives of Bach and Handel without fixing their cataracts is butchery for the ages as arts history goes.
Cataracts are vastly easier to treat now than 250 years ago and yet there's a grim joke in the field about how the best way to give someone cataracts is to remove cataracts. Even if Dr. Taylor had somehow miraculously not butchered the eyesight of Bach and Handel the odds that they would have been subsequently blinded by secondary cataracts was still likely to have been a certainty.
Thanks to 19th century mythologizing J. S. Bach looms larger in our collective imaginations than he ever did in his own lifetime. I don't want to digress into all the history, aesthetics and associated stuff connected to that too much ... although I did recently finish Jaroslav Pelikan's wonderful little book Bach Among the Theologians recently and a while back I finished Laurence Dreyfus' compelling Bach and the Patterns of Invention. I gotta say of the second book that having read it, it's as though Gioia and I came to drastically different conclusions about what Bach was described as rebelling against and why. Gioia's take seems more Bach was some James Dean rockist rebel-without-a-cause whereas Dreyfus' proposal was that Bach was a singularly anti-Enlightenment thinker and musician who, however disinclined he was to dissent from the nascent Enlightenment in literary terms he did by way of musical/compositional method.
Now with Pelikan, obviously, he got into the literally doctrinal reasons J. S. Bach can't be considered any kind of Enlightenment sympathizer. What he got into, however, was what he described as J. S. Bach's "evangelical catholicity" and by the time you finish Pelikan's little book you'll see what he meant, that Bach was a confessional Lutheran who nevertheless drew inspiration from Pietist writings; had no qualms composing Mass in B minor (Pelikan wishes Bach had written a vernacular German mass as some scholars speculated Bach was considering); and pointed out that J. S. had an explosion of compositional work in secular concert and chamber music while employed by a Calvinist court. Which, to translate that for those who aren't religious themselves, is saying Bach was a sincere Christian who was neither more pious than usual nor less pious than usual for his time and place but who was willing to work across literally confessional boundaries as long as he regarded the teams as within the realm of orthodox Christianity.
I'd recommend the Pelikan for anyone who wants a short and to the point overview of the major theological and philosophical currents of Bach's life and times who doesn't also have anything like a seminary or divinity school education. I kinda want to read more about Lutheran worship wars from the time of Bach and there look to be some fun books on that topic but that's straying off topic for what is supposed to be a short post.
