5 Questions for Andrew Gant

1. What compelled you to write about Bach?

I think all musicians are drawn to Bach because his music combines a glorious immediate appeal with an inexhaustible wealth of depth and detail. Performing and teaching his music only continues to deepen my interest and admiration. But at the same time the man himself remains rather in the shadows, much more so than, for example, his larger-than-life contemporary Handel. I knew that the man who created this wonderful art must be more interesting then the slightly dour image we can easily get

2. What has been your favourite part of the writing process?

Getting to know the real man from his letters and other documents. Visiting his places of work in Leipzig and seeing the wonderfully evocative collections in the Bach museum and Town museum. Hearing the Thomanerchor- Bach’s own choir- singing his music in his own church

3. What have you learned about yourself as an author?

That summing up an achievement on this scale in 20000 words is even harder than I thought: but it’s always great fun trying to communicate something of the character of a place, a person and an age

4. Whose writing did you look to during your research?

There is a wealth of original documentation about Bach, though much of it is fairly dry administrative stuff. Scholars who have done the world a huge service in assembling this material include Christoph Wolff. Another writer-scholar I came to admire hugely was Bach’s first biographer Nikolaus Forkel, writing in the decades after his death with the help of his sons

5. What’s next for you as an author?

One of the other of the great triumvirate of 1685, Handel. And a major single-volume history of music - yes, all of it.