John Eliot Gardiner

“The way we define opera circa 1700 may help us to throw light not just on the choices facing Bach and his…

— John Eliot Gardiner

“Music had shown that it could now articulate, reflect and project a sense of an established secular order – hence allowing the…

— John Eliot Gardiner

“Talent [by which I think she meant technique] without genius is not worth much; but genius without talent is worth nothing whatsoever.”

— John Eliot Gardiner

“We shall see shortly that Bach was to seize on a mutant type of opera that was to serve his purpose when…

— John Eliot Gardiner

“In his imaginative response to Luther’s text, Bach makes us aware that music can do much more than merely mirror the words…

— John Eliot Gardiner

“This faculty is mother wit, the creative power through which man is capable of recognising likenesses and making them himself. We see…

— John Eliot Gardiner

“His naivety was of the sort that Descartes no doubt had in mind when he concluded that the study of history, like…

— John Eliot Gardiner

“Mattheson was perhaps too clever for his own good; nonetheless the smart money was on this sophisticated and broadly educated polymath. Later…

— John Eliot Gardiner

“Kepler reportedly said, amid the massacres of religious wars, the laws of elliptical motion belong to no man or principality.’17 The same…

— John Eliot Gardiner