‘bach & sons’: the man, the music and the dynasty | thearticle

For those who have yet to put a toe in the water of live entertainment in London, who enjoy great acting and great music, and who have yet to discover the capital’s most innovative theatre,

look no further. The show you are looking for is _Bach & Sons_, the new play by Nina Raine, directed by Nicholas Hytner. First, the venue: situated on the South Bank near Tower Bridge, a

pleasant riverside walk from London Bridge Station, the Bridge Theatre is a superb augmentation to the London stage. The seating is comfortable and accessible, the acoustics are excellent,

the auditorium adaptable, the bar inviting and the loos plentiful. Most importantly, Hytner has clearly set out to encourage new talent — some of the cast were making their débuts — and to

bring to commercial theatre the skills he acquired at the National Theatre during his tenure from 2003 to 2015. As an immersive theatrical experience, Hytner’s Bridge is hard to beat.

Second, the playwright: Nina Raine is not yet a household name but she probably deserves to be. After success in London and New York with _Tribes _and _Consent, _she has another new play,

_Stories,_ opening at the National Theatre in November. _Bach & Sons _is, as the title cleverly implies, a dramatisation of Johann Sebastian’s complex relationship with his unavoidably

overshadowed offspring, but also a depiction of the family music business. Ms Raine is herself the daughter of the poet and literary critic Craig Raine, while her mother is the scholar and

translator Ann Pasternak Slater, a niece of Boris Pasternak, author of _Dr Zhivago,_ and granddaughter of Tolstoy’s artist friend Leonid Pasternak. So Ms Raine is no stranger to what Harold

Bloom called “the anxiety of influence”. Her depiction of the Bach wives and sons trying to take the great man down a peg or two certainly ring true. When Nina Raine does dynasties, she

knows whereof she speaks. And her bold decision to put one of the greatest composers of all time on stage proves to be a shrewd one, guaranteeing her a concert-going audience. Thirdly, the

play: Raine is adept at setting her family rows and reconciliations in the context of wider intellectual controversy. In this case, the background is the transition from baroque to classical

music, which ultimately leaves the ageing maestro and his beloved counterpoint looking outdated. The unspoken question that haunts this witty and moving chronicle of the Bachs is: why can’t

the old boy find it in himself to praise his two most gifted sons? It isn’t merely the perfectionism of a master craftsman. Sebastian grudgingly acknowledges the “impressive” compositions

of Carl Philipp Emanuel, the younger of the two, who enjoys success at the court of Frederick the Great. But poor Carl is doomed to be damned with faint praise. His alcoholic older brother

Willi and the feckless Gottfried, by contrast, are constantly bailed out by their overprotective father. Carl brings up the parable of the Prodigal Son, but the predicament of the Bach boys

is that neither the due diligence of the dutiful nor the repentance of the reckless will ever be quite good enough for the patriarch. If the challenge of the drama is to glimpse inside the

head of a genius, it’s heart lies in the mixture of devotion and competition between the three women in JS Bach’s life. María Barbara, his first wife, is much put-upon but no less dear to

him for that. Her sister Katharina plays the Martha to her Mary, pining for the unattainable. And the younger, more talented and more glamorous Anna Magdalena waits for her chance. Yet all

three women face a grim choice: permanently pregnant, losing many of their children, or unmarried and childless. Either way, it was a life of relentless servitude. In this post-pandemic

period, it is good to be reminded of how pre-modern medicine mostly did more harm than good. J.S. Bach lost his eyesight and later his life to a botched cataract operation; the same English

oculist then operated on his contemporary Handel and left him blind, too. Fourthly, the cast: it was uniformly superb, but Simon Russell Beale as Sebastian inevitably dominates the stage,

just as he does the story. His is an earthier, more rumbustious Bach than the saintly figure the audience may have been expecting, but Russell Beale carries it off with a twinkle in his eye.

The paucity of personal information that survives entitles Raine to take some liberties with the evidence; the only false note was the suggestion that Bach had “doubts” about God. There’s

no reason at all to think that his faith was ever in question, however much the family’s trials and tribulations may have tested it. On the other hand, the scenes at the court of Frederick,

played with a sinister brilliance by Pravessh Rana, were a magnificent contrast between the stubborn integrity of the old man, the creepy menace of the king, and the hopeless dilemma of the

son caught between his father and his boss. No less vivid were the scenes of sibling rivalry: the counterpoint of Carl (Samuel Blenkin) and Wilhelm (Douggie McMeekin) was as subtle as a Bach

fugue. Finally, the music: the performances were all recorded specially for this production by Voices8, the SDG Ensemble and its various soloists, directed by Nicholas Kraemer. Hytner’s

ingenious direction ensures that even a sophisticated audience is bewitched by the actors’ mimed musicianship. And the glorious musical interludes are an integral part of the action. It is

an open question that musicology cannot answer whether, for example, the Chaconne from the Partita for Violin no.2,  BWV 1004, was indeed a belated requiem for Maria Barbara (who was dead

and buried by the time Bach returned from accompanying a royal excursion). All we can say for sure is that, three centuries later, it remains a pinnacle of the solo violin repertoire.  The

music of Johann Sebastian Bach will always remain a mystery, a quasi-divine one, all the more so because the man who composed it is almost equally mysterious. _Bach & Sons _does not lift

the veil of the sublime, because no one can do that, but the play brings us closer to the human reality behind the superhuman achievement. A MESSAGE FROM THEARTICLE _We are the only

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