John Eliot Gardiner – författare

An unconventional, brilliant new biography of composer Claudio Monteverdi – from the bestselling biographer and acclaimed conductor John Eliot Gardiner. This book positions Claudio Monteverdi amidst seven leading lights of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: Galileo, Bacon, Kepler, Rubens, Shakespeare and Caravaggio.Using Monteverdi as the sun, centre of those six other greats, this book argues that across these tumultuous centuries when science was reconfiguring man’s entire relation with the cosmos, and many were arguing for the ‘science of music’, Monteverdi became a key to understanding and bringing together all of this knowledge. As it became believed that art and music could, like nothing else, reflect the human soul, Monteverdi’s music represented and unlocked the shift in human thought and the attitude toward modernity encapsulated by a sudden prizing of subjectivity and self-reflection.This book will reintroduce Monteverdi in a new light, with a new significance, but it’s also a wider study of these centuries and the speed at which thought and art were changing.

An unconventional, brilliant new biography of composer Claudio Monteverdi – from the bestselling biographer and acclaimed conductor John Eliot Gardiner. This book positions Claudio Monteverdi amidst seven leading lights of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: Galileo, Bacon, Kepler, Rubens, Shakespeare and Caravaggio.Using Monteverdi as the sun, centre of those six other greats, this book argues that across these tumultuous centuries when science was reconfiguring man’s entire relation with the cosmos, and many were arguing for the ‘science of music’, Monteverdi became a key to understanding and bringing together all of this knowledge. As it became believed that art and music could, like nothing else, reflect the human soul, Monteverdi’s music represented and unlocked the shift in human thought and the attitude toward modernity encapsulated by a sudden prizing of subjectivity and self-reflection.This book will reintroduce Monteverdi in a new light, with a new significance, but it’s also a wider study of these centuries and the speed at which thought and art were changing.

Johann Sebastian Bach is one of the most unfathomable composers in the history of music. How can such sublime work have been produced by a man who seems so ordinary, so opaque - and occasionally so intemperate?In this remarkable book, John Eliot Gardiner distils the fruits of a lifetime's immersion as one of Bach's greatest living interpreters. Explaining in wonderful detail how Bach worked and how his music achieves its effects, he also takes us as deeply into Bach's works and mind as perhaps words can. The result is a unique book about one of the greatest of all creative artists.