The Cello Suites by Eric Siblin

Just as Johann Sebastian Bach managed to pack entire worlds into his six Cello Suites, author Eric Siblin does the same in his book devoted to Bach's classic work. In Siblin's The Cello Suites: J.S. Bach, Pablo Casals and the search for a Baroque Masterpiece (787.41858 SIBLIN), Siblin follows in engaging, readable fashion the two men responsible for bringing the suite to the masses: its storied composer and the preeminent performer who brought it to the masses.

Bach wrote the Cello Suites sometime in the early 1700s but it wasn't until the fateful day Catalan cellist Pablo Casals, then only a boy, discovered the sheet music in a 1890 that the piece truly began its foray into popular culture. During the nearly two centuries in between, the suites were regarded as nothing more than a collection of exercises. Casals, who attained rock star status (for a classical musician) as a solo cellist, changed all that.

Siblin weaves history, culture, politics and even a bit of mystery — the original manuscript has never been found — into the story behind the Cello Suites.

It was in the small German town of Cöthen in 1720 that the Cello Suites were said to have been composed and inscribed by Bach's raven-quill pen. But without his original manuscript, how can we be certain? Why was such monumental music written for the cello, a lowly instrument usually relegated to background droning in Bach's time? And given that Bach regularly rewrote his music for different instruments, how can we even be sure that the music was written for the cello?

If every there were such a thing as a classical music adventure, Siblin takes us on one. In his quest to ferret out the secrets of the Cello Suites, the former pop music critic for The Montreal Gazette becomes "a card-carrying member of the American Bach Society." He attends a scholarly conference at Princeton devoted to the Baroque composer. He attempts to learn cello. He journeys to Europe to interview musicians, visit archives, attend performances of the Cello Suites and retrace Bach and Casals' footsteps.

We are left with a much more complete sense of the suites' colorful history and the way it has almost serendipitously found a life of its own in the 21st century.

Amadeus (1984) DVD / a Milos Forman film based on a play by Peter Shaffer; starring F. Murray Abraham, Tom Hulce, Elizabeth Berridge & Jeffrey Jones

"I heard the music of true forgiveness filling the theater, conferring on all who sat there, perfect absolution. God was singing through this little man to all the world, unstoppable, making my defeat more bitter with every passing bar."

Ever since he was a teenager, Antonio Salieri has been Wolfgang Mozart's biggest fan. When the then boy wonder Mozart was wowing the most respected audiences of Europe, Salieri himself had been ardently striving to achieve even an ounce of the majesty that the prodigy possessed. Now only a few years later and in a position to meet and procure the comradery of the Austrian genius, Salieri, himself a moderately successful court composer, is finally introduced to the world's most popular musician only to be horrified by the crude, insincere spoiled brat that is the young Mozart. The man they call the greatest maestro of them all, the man on whom God has bestowed such talent and the granted such an incredible magnitude of singular prowess is little more than a childish baffoon who flouts convention, spouts profanity and prefers tasteless jokes to well-mannered conversation. Even Mozart's own father, Wolfgang, Sr., disgusted at his son's garish antics and refusal to remain with him at home in Salsburg, has essentially let the boy (still in his early twenties circa 1780) alone to do his thing in Vienna where his talent and ingenuity will need to win over the Austrian Emperor and the other pompous court composers like Salieri.

And so he does. To no one's real surprise, Mozart not only wins over the court but the whole empire and indeed the entire world as, in the course of the next ten or so years, the composer revolutionizes music and European culture through his extraordinary repertoire of symphonies (25th and 40th of note), operas (The Magic Flute, Don Giovanni, The Marriage of Figaro, etc.) and assorted concertos, arias, sonatas and choral arrangements (i.e., The Requiem Mass). The only one not overwhelmed by such an epochal transcendence of musical genius upon humanity is Salieri who's simply incensed with the fates and with God himself ("from now on you and I are enemies") for gifting the irreverent Mozart with such skill. So enraged with malice is Salieri that he begins to plot the end of the man he once revered as a peerless master but now loathes with a recrimination so vengeful that he'd rather be committed to an asylum than have to listen to his music again.

Oscars aplenty for Best Director, Picture and Leading Actor (for Abraham, not Hulce) as well as for Sound and Costumes, enormous praise from the international community and a lasting impression of what a period piece should be are all wonderful but it's Mozart's laugh which makes this film a memorable one. A shamelessly off key cackle which breaks the stuffy serenity of all it encounters, it's the one and likely only aspect of the movie which registers at an atonal level. It's been claimed that the concept for it derives from correspondence written by second and third parties who characterize "an infectious giddy . . . like metal scraping glass" laugh which the composer possessed though little record of this has been substantiated. Employed as a dramatic device in the film, it brilliantly captures the mocking "laughter of the gods" which Abraham's Salieri hears in both the literal and figurative sense. Only 35 when he died in 1791, not by poison as the film speculates on but rather a likely rheumatic fever, Mozart remains immortal as a man who gave the world several lifetimes worth of resplendent music. (DVD AMADEUS)