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John Eliot Gardiner: Bach’s Habit of Imperfection | Big Think

Big Think | January 29, 2026



John Eliot Gardiner: Bach’s Habit of Imperfection
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Gardiner, author of the new book, Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven, has a unique perspective on Bach. He is both a historian and a world-renowned conductor who has throughout his career made hundreds of recordings on the prestigious Deutsche Grammophon label. Bach, the orphan rebel, had a suspicion of authority that ran deep throughout his life, and made him an often domineering and unpleasant person to deal with.

Gardiner doesn’t see any contradiction here. “The very fact that this music is so profound and so uplifting and the man is clearly not a saint makes it all the more interesting,” he says.
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JOHN ELIOT GARDINER:

Sir John Eliot Gardiner CBE FKC is an English conductor and the author of Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven.
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TRANSCRIPT:

John Eliot Gardiner: I think there’s been a slightly deplorable tendency amongst Bach’s biographers to paint Bach the human being in a very complimentary light. To imply that great music requires a great man and a great human being and a great personality to be behind it. Well, of course great music requires a creator but it doesn’t have to be a paragon – he doesn’t have to be a paragon of virtue. And Bach certainly wasn’t.

The more that one discovers about him, the more one discovers that he was a deeply flawed character. That even though we have very, very few family records and letters to go on there are incidents that keep cropping up in his life at almost a repetitive pattern of antagonistic behavior between him and authority – the authorities for whom he worked. He was very combative. He really took them on.

But I think we can trace it back really to his earliest times. All right he started off in a presumably very happy family situation with both parents living but he didn’t go to school very often. We have a lot of records of truancy. Now, why? Why was he not at school? That’s one big question. Then comes the double shock of both parents dying before he’s ten. And his upheaval rooted as he was in Eisenach. He’s now uprooted and he goes to live with his elder brother, Johann Christoph, a few miles away in Ohrdruf.

And suddenly his grades shoot up, a reaction to his orphanhood – who knows. But the more I’ve been able to delve into the circumstances and the context of his schooling, the worse it becomes. It looks as if the schools – both the first two schools that he was involved in were prone to very modern sounding difficulties of, you know, overcrowding in classrooms, shortage of textbooks, hooliganism in the classroom, lobbing of bricks through windows, chasing of the girls, coming to school with daggers and spears and a good deal of unpleasant bullying and sadistic behavior.

There was one particular schoolmaster of Bach’s when he was in Ohrdruf and he was probably then only about 11 or 12 who was known as the bully and the sadist of the school. And eventually he got handed his cards and he left but not before inflicting God knows what damage on his pupils. And this is a theme that goes all the way through Bach’s schooling and we can’t say with assurance – well, he was damaged. But it does come out in certain ways.

For example, in his very first job that was when he was organist in Arnstadt. He gets into a quarrel with a bassoonist. He writes a piece of music with a rather difficult couple of riffs for the bassoon and the bassoonist obviously makes a complete mess of it, he can’t handle it. So Bach swears at him and calls him something pretty rude and the guy reacts by setting upon him in the market square. He comes up to him with a cudgel and Bach draws his sword and defends himself. And there’s tremendous fisticuffs which is only broken up by the onlookers.

And Bach goes off to his employers and says, “What’s all that? You know, you’ve got to protect me.” And they don’t. That leads to a feeling of suspicion of authority that runs right away through his life. And it comes up again and again and again. And that comes into the foreground when he’s working in Weimar for the two dukes – the Duke Wilhelm Ernest and his nephew who share the authority.

And Bach is unhappy there. He feels he’s been passed over for the succession to become Kapellmeister. He feels aggrieved. He looks for another job. He’s appointed, and he doesn’t get permission from the Dukes to leave. So they throw him into prison and for a month he’s disgraced and imprisoned.

Read the full transcript at https://bigthink.com/videos/bachs-habit-of-imperfection-2

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Comments

This post currently has 26 comments.

  2. @SSB-im9mn

    January 29, 2026 at 8:06 am

    I don't think anyone has claimed seriously that Bach was some kind of a paragon, especially as a child. But it's a bit irrelevant really, and I'm not sure where Gardiner – himself no stranger to odd behaviour – thinks he needs to mention it. That the fights Bach "picks" were unnecessary is something that we can't possibly know; his reasons were up to him and I think his behaviour in some cases at least indicates that he was unable to stomach unfairness in particular – a trait that more should adopt, in my view. And whilst clearly not a "saint" – who said he was? – there can be no doubt that Bach's devout Christianity and faith underpinned both his work ethic and the obvious deep spirituality of his music.

  3. @shantanu.t

    January 29, 2026 at 8:06 am

    The back story to Bach was awesome! The interpretation of the story, though slightly endearing, was absurd.

    It misses the whole point, if you ask me. Based on how Bach’s music ties in with his fascinating back story, I’d say the following:

    -Bach was a man of integrity and a truth seeker.
    -He abhorred corruption.
    -He always tried to do the right thing and stand up for the right causes even if it was hard to do so.
    -He learned to become his own best advocate.
    -He was a man of faith and possibly quite high on the light triad.

    The interpretation in the video is somewhat naive and child-like. Bach would laugh at it, or more accurately roll in his grave.

    Human being are imperfect by nature… Bach included; there’s nothing new about that.
    What makes a saint a saint? That’s another fascinating topic—unrelated to Bach.

  4. @eduardoribeiro9109

    January 29, 2026 at 8:06 am

    I undestand, but disagree in some points. Like all other humans, Bach had an EGO, a character structure, which causes the repeated behavior along the life. But Bach had an evidently superb connection whith higher values which he could access to create his music. An imperfect human being who reach his perfect soul to create Divine Art. Probably he misunderstood his existencial formula of being, because his inmense capacity to create whith a necessity of an special personal consideration, which lead him to fights whith authorities along his life.

  9. @EPICSOUNDTRAX

    January 29, 2026 at 8:06 am

    Bach and Beethoven were not pleasent people
    Also Mozart was not first class sitizen
    The high society still not talking openly why and how mozard died
    For today standards Mozart would be cancelled comoletely and labeled sex adict.
    The guy had the most perverted sexual adictions and died because if them.

  11. @dpurdynyc

    January 29, 2026 at 8:06 am

    I completely agree with Mr. Gardiner. The evidence he puts forth about Bach’s traumatized nature speaks to the power of music to ground us and help us cope with the pain that can rise up in our lives. Bach’s transcendent genius may have been aided by his personal trauma and his necessity to save himself from the anxiety with which he must of coped. It speaks, I believe, of his music’s ability to offer its own beautiful meaning.

  12. @Thelonious2Monk

    January 29, 2026 at 8:06 am

    Not submitting to authority is a great virtue. Bach's music is full of innovations that probably shocked the musical "authorities" of the time. Lucky us that he was that way.

  16. @lesliecunliffe4450

    January 29, 2026 at 8:06 am

    John Eliot Gardiner does a great job dismantling the personality fallacy. One can make great art while simultaneously having a difficult and disagreeable personality. Research into creativity reveals that an unhappy childhood is a spur to creative development. Human beings are messy.

  18. @stephend7420

    January 29, 2026 at 8:06 am

    I find this obsession with undermining Bach's character rather tedious. Gardiner is a conductor with (I think) an inflated opinion of himself. He is attacking a straw man (a position he attributes to imaginary opponents that no Bach expert actually adopts). It would be a better use of his time if he started thinking about the gospel message that infuses Bach's choral music. Gardiner probably does not believe the gospel. Since he performs cantatas in which the gospel is preached, with artists who do not believe it either, that makes him a hypocrite in my view.

  21. @1TimBaugh

    January 29, 2026 at 8:06 am

    Why is challenging authority a personal weakness? This guy mounts a somewhat strange and severally flawed argument. It would'nt take much imagination to use the character trait of combativeness as part of a descrption of a rather exceptional person. Just not clear what he's getting at.

  25. @lunchmind

    January 29, 2026 at 8:06 am

    I like Mr Gardiner's thinking but I don't see Bach's attitudes towards authority as "flaws" or "imperfections". He apparently had legitimate reasons to confront these petty characters. How can one learn or stay sane in an overcrowded classroom infested by bullying and textbook shortages?If Bach had aflaw, it was an alleged anti-Semitism inspired by his religious mentor, Martin Luther.

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