The Cello Suites: J.S. Bach, Pablo Casals, and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece
by Eric Siblin
House of Anansi (2009), 320 pp.

On an autumn night in 2000, Eric Siblin sat in Toronto’s Royal Conservatory as Laurence Lesser bowed his way through Bach’s Cello Suites. It was music that Siblin, the Montreal Gazette’s pop music critic for a stretch in the ’90s, had never heard before, and it immediately began transforming his life. By the time his journey into the Suites’ complicated history was complete, he had discovered the Byzantine lineage of their manuscripts, sung bass in an amateur Bach choir, travelled the musical capitals of Europe, and traced the career of Pablo Casals, the legendary cellist whose childhood discovery of the Suites, and lifelong dedication to playing them, is largely responsible for their canonical status.

All of this is recorded in Siblin’s new book, a delightful whirlwind tour through two different ages of musical history that recreates Bach’s awkward eighteenth century as richly it does Casals’ troubled twentieth. Siblin’s research is remarkably comprehensive — he has a particularly keen eye for the telling domestic detail — and his prose is amiable, at times charming (at one point, he offers his thoughts on the extent of “Bach’s street cred”). Beyond the details, the book’s greatest triumph is its structure, which borrows from the music: six sections, one for each suite, offer six chapters each, one for each movement, with the stories of Bach, Casals, and Siblin’s personal search rotating throughout, creating a thematic counterpoint that cleverly suggests the timelessness of the music it explores. As Siblin inevitably concludes, “Every age reimagines Bach on its own terms.” We’re lucky that we have a writer this skilful and creative to do the work.

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