Biography as autobiography

In an interesting piece on the latest biography of the composer Johann Sebastian Bach in the New York Review of Books, George B Stauffer points out that Bach’s first biographer (in 1802), Johann Nicolaus Forkel, a Geman nationalist portrayed the composer as an ideal German citizen, while the next, a century later, the theologian Philipp Spitta, focused on the importance of religion in Bach’s life and work. A more recent biographer, a professor at Harvard, Christoph Wolff, presented him as an intellectual, a “learned musician”.

Turning to the newest tome*, Stauffer points out that John Eliot Gardiner proposes that Bach was an angry man. Although he doesn’t say so in so many words, the clear implication is that Gardiner himself has anger as a core driver.

As someone who reads (and writes) a great deal of biographical stuff, it seems to me that it is inescapable that writers portray their subjects through their own value system and psychological makeup. Both conscious and unconscious. Having some awareness of this seems valuable.

All biography is autobiography.

*John Eliot Gardiner, Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven, Knopf