Quotes from John Eliot Gardiner

Monteverdi gives us the full gamut of human pssions in music, the first composer to do so; Beethoven tells us what a terrible struggle it is to transcend human frailties and to aspire to the Godhead; and Mozart shows the kind of music we might hope to hear in heaven. But it is Bach, making music in the Castle of Heaven, who gives us the voice of God - in human form.

His naivety was of the sort that Descartes no doubt had in mind when he concluded that the study of history, like travel, while harmless enough as a form of entertainment – one composed of 'memorable events' which might conceivably 'elevate the mind' or 'help to form the judgement' – was hardly an occupation for anyone seriously concerned with increasing knowledge.

Each time we explore Bach's music we feel as if we have traveled great distances to, and through, a remote but entrancing soundscape

Music is the hidden arithmetical exercise of a mind unconscious that it is calculating.

Kepler reportedly said, amid the massacres of religious wars, the laws of elliptical motion belong to no man or principality.'17 The same could be said of music.

Talent [by which I think she meant technique] without genius is not worth much; but genius without talent is worth nothing whatsoever.

Not many people, however, are content to follow Albert Einstein's summary advice: 'This is what I have to say about Bach's life's work: listen, play, love, revere – and keep your trap shut.

Music had shown that it could now articulate, reflect and project a sense of an established secular order – hence allowing the absolutist polemics of Lully's court operas – and yet also be the mouthpiece of a radical sense of often beleaguered individuality. By 1700 music had developed techniques capable of dividing and ordering time and of holding the attention of its listeners in ways that would have been impossible a century earlier.

In his imaginative response to Luther's text, Bach makes us aware that music can do much more than merely mirror the words from start to finish: he shows that it can hold our attention and captivate us by metaphors that strike like lightning. As long as we are willing to let go and allow him to describe the world to us as he sees it, we are soon provided with a first point of entry.

This faculty is mother wit, the creative power through which man is capable of recognising likenesses and making them himself. We see it in children, in whom nature is more integral and less corrupted by convictions and prejudices, that the first faculty to emerge is that of seeing similarities.

The way we define opera circa 1700 may help us to throw light not just on the choices facing Bach and his brilliant peer group at the outset of their careers, but on the cultural milieu which demarcates the changing role of music in early-eighteenth-century society.

We shall see shortly that Bach was to seize on a mutant type of opera that was to serve his purpose when composing the more dramatic of his church cantatas and Passions.