John Eliot Gardiner – A portrait

When John Eliot  Gardiner was born on 20 April 1943 in the county of Dorset in south-west England, there was a picture of Johann Sebastian Bach hanging in his parents' house. Not some replica of a painting, but the original Bach portrait by Elias Gottlob Haußmann. Few people know that two versions of the portrait exist: one dating from 1746, and another that Haußmann painted two years later. They both show the master composer wearing a powdered wig and holding a sheet of music, and the main difference between them is their condition. The second portrait, which is a little better preserved, was owned by the family of a Jewish music teacher from Breslau, who fled to England at the outbreak of war and entrusted the Bach picture to his friends the Gardiner family for safekeeping.  

Thus it happened that the little John Eliot spent his childhood »under the Cantor's strict gaze«. – »I looked at the portrait every day until I was ten years old. I thought it was a bit strange, a bit didactic; but at the same time I learnt Bach's music off by heart as a boy. It took me a while to reconcile Bach's strict gaze with the sense of joy contained in his music, but in the meantime I have found a solution here.« A solution – that sounds like a typical piece of British understatement: since then it has been Gardiner's life's work to get to the heart of Bach's music and his character. Today, many critics regard the conductor as the world's leading Bach interpreter, at least where the vocal works are concerned. Hardly anyone else has immersed himself so deeply and comprehensively in the music of the great Baroque composer.

And that's not all: Gardiner has founded several different ensembles, and has had immense influence on the world of music as a pioneer of historic performing practice. John has long since been knighted, making him »Sir John«. And in the meantime he is one of the last representatives of that great generation of rostrum stars with the special, awe-inspiring aura given off by older male conductors – even though he himself once declared that »the era of despotic conductors is long since over, thank goodness!«

Gardiner not only grew up under Bach's strict gaze; the family's academic and intellectual background also influenced him. His grandfather was one of the leading Egyptologists of his time, while his father was a pioneer of organic farming who also did a lot to revive the traditional English folk dance. To this day, Gardiner runs an organic farm with herds of 100 cattle and 900 sheep. And music likewise played an important role at home: »I had the good fortune to grow up in a family of ambitious amateur musicians for whom music was simply part of everyday life. All of us sang and played an instrument.« 

As a result, he could already sing the soprano parts of the Bach motets from memory as a little boy; this and his German nanny explain his almost perfect German. In addition, he learnt to play the piano and the violin, which he later swapped for the viola.

Gardiner began his time at university as a history student at King’s College, Cambridge. But his passion for music didn't desert him, so that he took a break from his studies in his third year at Cambridge in order to pursue his first large-scale project: a performance of Monteverdi's »Vespro della Beata Vergine«, which he had known since childhood. Even then, he already had a precise vision of how he wanted the work to sound, and set out to find musicians and singers with whom he could put his ideas into practice.

Thus the Monteverdi Choir was born, which Gardiner saw at the time as a kind of »anti-choir« – »as an alternative to the civilised, melting beauty of sound that was typical of the King’s College Choir in my day«. The performance of the Monteverdi Vespers in March 1964 brought Gardiner some recognition, and above all strengthened his decision to concentrate solely on conducting in future.

He continued his musical studies in London and then moved to Paris as a pupil of Nadia Boulanger. The most important music teacher of the 20th century, it was from Boulanger that famous figures like Astor Piazzolla and Philip Glass learnt their trade. At this point, Mme. Boulanger was already over 80 and had gone nearly blind, »but her hearing was incredibly precise,« recalls Gardiner, who thinks back to his two years in her class with mixed feelings: »She was very, very strict and really hurt me. But it was necessary, and looking back I'm very grateful for it.« Back in England, he founded the Monteverdi Orchestra in 1968 (which in turn gave birth to the English Baroque Soloists ten years later).

The ensemble began by playing on modern instruments, as was usual in those days, and this became more and more of a problem for Gardiner, who was still pursuing his ideal of how Baroque music should sound. »I had arrived at a point where I couldn't progress any further with my efforts to create the sound I was looking for. We only had one choice: to start again with original Baroque instruments or copies of them.«

Gardiner was not the first person to perform music on instruments from the time when it was written, it's true – Austrian conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Gustav Leonhardt in Holland were ahead of him. But he was nonetheless a great exception at the time. And it was his doing to extend historic performing practice to the works of the Classical and Romantic periods, freeing them of what he once described in an interview as »the Karajan mush«.

To this end, Gardiner founded another orchestra to mark the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution in 1989: the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique. Like his other ensembles, the new orchestra initially met with sceptical reactions: »People have a firm idea of what an orchestra should sound like – and then we came along, true pioneers who were trying to find out what Beethoven, Berlioz or Schumann might have sounded like in the context of their time. This was a completely new and radical approach to 19th century music – it's no exaggeration to use the word revolutionary.«

Gardiner went on to realise many acclaimed large-scale projects with his various ensembles – mostly to mark special occasions. In 2017, for example, he staged productions of Monteverdi's three surviving operas as a cycle in several cities to celebrate the 450th anniversary of the composer's birth. In 2019 he played his way at numerous venues through Berlioz's core repertoire to mark the 150th anniversary of the French Romantic's death. But the most important of all his undertakings took place in the year 2000, when he performed all 200 Bach cantatas in the space of a year to mark the 250th anniversary of Bach's death.

This »Bach Cantata Pilgrimage« took him and his ensembles on a tour throughout Europe and to the USA, and it brought him a step closer to Bach as a person: »I finally had a possible solution to the riddle of how all this music so full of energy and imagination could have stemmed from beneath the wig of the Cantor whose indifferent gaze in his portrait had shaped my impression of him since childhood.«

But with classical symphony orchestras, Gardiner tended to rub people up the wrong way with his ambitious ideas. His positions as chief conductor in Vancouver, for instance, and at the Lyon Opera were not without success, but they remained short episodes in his career.

People have all but forgotten in the meantime that he even conducted the NDR Symphony Orchestra (since renamed the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra) for three seasons in the early nineties. This is a period that evokes mixed feelings nowadays. Stefan Wagner, the leader of the orchestra, for example remembers that »in those days, unlike now, it was something of a novelty for a conductor from the historic performing practice scene to take charge of one of the traditional radio symphony orchestras. The connection regrettably didn't last as long as had been hoped, as increasing tension emerged between the conductor and the orchestra«.

And the orchestra's own website refers to a »workaholic and perfectionist who could get intolerant under pressure«  - but also describes him as »friendly, with a good sense of humour«. In the end, Gardiner terminated the contract a year earlier than planned. But looking back, he still sees his time in Hamburg as profitable: »The orchestra and I worked hard together and I believe we were a successful team, as our concert and CD recordings prove«.

When John Eliot Gardiner returns to Hamburg now for three concerts in the time around his 80th birthday, he can be heard both with his own ensembles and as the guest conductor of a big symphony orchestra. He is performing the four Brahms symphonies with the Concertgebouw Orchestra, and he is particularly fond of the composer not only »because he wrote such expressive and passionate music«, but also because he was »a scholar who transcribed and conducted a great deal of music himself. One of the first historians in the ranks of composers«. Not unlike Gardiner, then, who is probably the greatest historian in the ranks of conductors.

And that brings us back once more to Bach. 2013 saw the publication of Gardiner's highly personal book »Music in the Castle of Heaven: A Portrait of Johann Sebastian Bach«, another major project where the self-confessed »lifelong Bach student« attempts on some 700 pages »to get to know the man through his work«. Another milestone on the road to reconciling Bach as a person with his music. The cover of the book shows the Cantor of St Thomas's with his strict gaze.

Text: Simon Chlosta; last updated: 15.11.2022
Translation: Clive Williams