Expertly crafted narrative on Bach masterpiece

[Seán]

This extract is from today's Irish Times:

ITE O'DONOVAN

BOOK OF THE DAY: The Cello Suites By Eric Siblin Harvill Secker 301pp, £14.99

IT IS the year 2000. An international Bach Year marks 2½ centuries since the death of Johann Sebastian Bach.

Author Eric Siblin, browsing through concert listings in a local newspaper, decides to attend a recital at Toronto’s Royal Conservatory of Music. A lone cellist is to perform three of the Bach Cello Suites.

Sitting in the audience, Siblin reads in the programme notes: “What music lovers don’t know, however, is that no known composer’s manuscript of these works exist.”

Siblin’s journalistic instincts are aroused. Enthralled by the Cello Suites, “music more earthly and ecstatic” than any he had heard before and which, according to the programme notes, were seen as mere exercises until newly interpreted by Pablo Casals at the dawn of the 20th century, he is motivated to “follow in the footsteps of the notes” and embarks upon an intriguing trail.

The book is cleverly divided into six main sections with subchapter headings taking their titles from the musical movements of the Cello Suites.

Three distinct stories are revealed. Siblin brings his readers on a journey through time that is structured as three glorious lines of polyphony, carefully interwoven yet distinct and independent.

At one moment we are in 18th-century Germany, standing beside the great composer Bach as silent witnesses to life events which may have led his inspirational muse to compose one or other of the suites.

Next we find ourselves with the young Casals at the end of the 19th century, sensing his excitement as a 13-year-old boy when he discovered the scores of the Cello Suites in a second-hand music shop. We observe his personal homage to the music which motivated him, not only to wait 12 years before he played any of the suites in public, but also to continue to play them on a daily basis throughout a long lifetime.

And finally, in the gigue – the last “dance” of each main chapter – we are with Siblin as he unveils his personal encounter with Bach’s music.

We read how Siblin, enraptured by the music of the Cello Suites, is motivated to listen to recordings, attend performances and music seminars and, ever the journalist, interview great cellists.

However Siblin has also gone a stage further. He reveals how he sought to discover the composer, the instrument and the music for himself by endeavouring to come in contact with the actual notes through his own attempts at performance.

In the course of The Cello Suites , the reader is brought through a well-documented life of Bach and beyond to the composer’s musician sons and their success, or lack of, in safeguarding an irreplaceable legacy: the original manuscripts of their father.

The reader encounters Casals discovering his prodigious talent as an exponent of the cello and as a conductor. His life in Catalonia, France and in his latter years Puerto Rico, birthplace of his mother, is also recounted.

We learn of Casals’s integrity as a man of high principles and political fervour, which induced him to put his international performing career on hold for 20 years rather than break a vow not to play in countries that recognised the Franco dictatorship.

With each new chapter, we embark on an exciting journey of discovery and are not disappointed as surprises lurk on every page.

Expertly crafted, with the narrative as finely structured and controlled as the music that led Siblin on his quest, The Cello Suites is a wonderful read. The language is beautiful, the research impeccable.

Siblin is writing not for the classical connoisseur but for the interested reader. Musicians will also be captivated by this book.