2023-04-20 12:51:16
For the greater glory of God
Sir John Eliot Gardiner is also an organic farmer
Quelle: Getty Images – Luc Castel
The British conductor John Eliot Gardiner revolutionized historical performance practice. He stretched them from Bach to the edge of modernity. A homage to an infinitely curious king of baroque music.
John Eliot Gardiner is also an organic farmer, and he was one long before it became fashionable. But while King Charles III. had to wait almost 74 years before actually practicing his profession, King John Eliot I was much faster. The part-time farmer at Springhead Farm in North Dorset, six years his senior, has been wielding the scepter in the realm of gut strings and natural trumpets, viols, harpsichords and viole d’amore since his earliest youth.
John Eliot Gardiner called his enlarged second orchestra Révolutionnaire et Romantique – after the English Baroque Soloists founded in 1964, including the attached Monteverdi Choir. And it showed that while he was lucky that the revolution of historically informed music-making on old instruments (or replicas) had been won by the pioneer generation before him and he only had to step through wide open doors, the 19th century offered him new ones Challenges for tonally subversive things, curiosity and also emotional surges – of course always ecologically sustainable.
![+subject to a fee+++ Piano fantasy in C minor, handwritten notes and portrait of Johann Sebastian Bach, 1685 - 1750, a German composer and organ and piano virtuoso of the Baroque era [ Rechtehinweis: picture alliance/imageBROKER ]](https://img.welt.de/img/kultur/mobile191890065/4072500687-ci102l-w1024/Klavierfantasie-in-C-moll-Notenhandschrift-und-Portrait-von-Johann-Sebastian-Ba.jpg)
Born on April 20, 1943 in Fontmell Magna, and long since made Commander of the British Empire (by the music-loving Charles, by the way), today he commands music from Monteverdi to Lehár, with very strong accents on Bach and Berlioz, Schumann and Mendelssohn.
He also knew how to ennoble a wise work like Verdi’s “Falstaff” in an audible manner, and Offenbach doesn’t seem sparkling enough for him. He can get pretty grumpy during rehearsal. If something doesn’t go his way, that’s the end of the proverbial British politeness. Gardiner then explodes as a volcano. Most of the time, however, he only does this in the service of the music.
Where John Eliot Gardiner on the podium seems superior and correct, even stiff. To smile he goes safely to his sheepfold. But something else arises from the magic of his magical hands: blooming melodies, knowing rhythms, a confident understanding of sovereignty and structures. Nothing can go wrong with Gardiner. It is a super safe baroque bench.
His understanding of music has also hardly aged over the years. His early recordings are just as inspiring today as his current ones. For the round birthday they appear bundled in powerful boxes, in the DG (with baroque in Archiv and romantic in Philips) as with his immense French repertoire in Erato.
The more than 250 recordings are in such demand that he, who still records CDs to this day, eventually opened his own label – after a quarrel with Deutsche Grammophon in 2000. They liked his Bach pilgrimage through churches all over Europe, which they thought was getting out of hand and the USA, during which he recorded all of Bach’s cantatas: he called his company “Soli Deo Gloria”, just as Bach once signed his scores, dedicating them to the only god.
But Gardiner was allowed to do that, after all he grew up under the original of the famous portrait by Elias Gottlob Haussmann, which is probably the only authentic depiction of Bach. The family friends of his parents who owned it felt it was more protected in the country than in London during the war.
Opera debut with The Magic Flute
John Eliot Gardiner sang as a boy with his family and in the church choir. Early childhood imprinting can be that simple. He taught himself to play the violin, at the age of 15 he already had his first experience of conducting, at the age of 21 he founded his choir and started his career with the “Vespro della Beata Vergine” by Monteverdi.
He hadn’t even finished his history and music studies at Cambridge. He graduated from King’s College London and from Nadia Boulanger in Paris. In 1969 Gardiner made his operatic debut at English National Opera with The Magic Flute.
From 1980 to 1983 Gardiner was chief conductor of the CBC Vancouver Orchestra, from 1981 to 1990 artistic director of the Handel Festival in Göttingen, 1983 to 1988 music director of the Opéra National de Lyon, whose orchestra he newly founded. In 1983 he presented his discovery, the Messe solennelle by Hector Berlioz.
From 1991 to 1994, John Eliot Gardiner was chief conductor of the NDR Symphony Orchestra in Hamburg. That didn’t end well for the cool North Germans and the passionate polemicist.
His Bach book is called “Music for the Himmelsburg”. From 2014 to 2018 he was president of the Leipzig Bach Archive and was involved in the Bach 333 box with the recording of all Bach works. As a regular guest, he conducts the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Vienna and Berlin Philharmonics, the Staatskapelle Dresden and the Gewandhaus Orchestra.
This late summer, Gardiner, who not only proves his evergreen thumb as a farmer, gives himself the best Berlioz gift with a big “Les Troyens” tour. And so all that’s left to say is: Happy 80th birthday, Sir Eliot! Long live the king of baroque music!
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