THE LITTLE CHRONICLE OF MAGDALENA BACH. (Chatto and Windus. 6s.)
THIS book purports to have been written by Bach's second wife, after his death and at the suggestion of his old and favourite pupil, Caspar Burgholt. The anonymous author has allowed his imagination to play around the known facts of the great musician's life. Doubtless there are tight-laced critics who will disapprove of such tampering with truth ; but, after all, nothing can lie more thoroughly at times than mere " facts." Subtlety and piquancy did not belong to Bach's character, which was as open, honest, and humble as the course of his career was uneventful. It is true that he had his tempers, hut, except on one occasion when he took off his wig and flung it at a fellow-musician whose stupidity was only matched by his pomposity, they led to nothing worse than altercations with the Leipzig Town Council, who, as his employers, disliked the " unclerical " style of his compositions and were ruffled by his general independence of spirit. He also had his sorrows, for, of the twenty children born to
him by his two wives, several, not unnaturally, died. In the absence of any more dramatic material, however, the
author has woven out of the facts of Bach's life a tender and
graceful domestic idyll. Whether, at any rate among musical geniuses, there have ever been husbands so perfect as Sebastian appears in these pages to Magdalena, and .whether, even in eighteenth-century Leipzig, wives were ever quite so flawless in self-effacement, are matters for conjecture. But-, in its broad lines, this small volume, which deals only casually with Bach's music, suggests convincingly and very pleasantly the atmosphere of domestic and social life in the old, legendary Germany.
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