Something of his Art: Walking to Lubeck with J. S. Bach by Horatio Clare
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
There is a style of book that populates the shelves of middle class homes, mostly in England. It is a gentle piece of quirky non-fiction into which you can dip on a lazy Sunday afternoon. It feels indulgently erudite, warming the insides of your university-educated ego as you delight in a particularly well-crafted metaphor, or the deployment of a somewhat archaic adjective you imagine other classes of reader would be forced to look up on their phones.
Such is the book Horatio Clare sat down to produce when writing Something of his Art: Walking to Lubeck with J.S.Bach (Field Notes). A sheaf of said field notes – most likely handwritten – lay next to a computer, perhaps held in place by a mug of good coffee, as Horatio set about recounting his ‘adventures’ while recording a BBC documentary that follows the historic walk of Johann Sebastian Bach across the Germany of 1705.
The problem is, Clare largely fails. To be fair, there are exceptionally well-written passages lost in the long and wearisome trek that is this short tract. But its central purpose – to give the reader a sense of the young J.S. Bach and his walk from Central Germany to the coastal city of Lubeck, to meet the then-famous composer Buxtehude – is lost.
We do not get Something of Bach’s Art. Instead we get a rather dry, tired account of three middle-aged men on a work assignment for the British state broadcaster. We learn much about Horatio Clare: he likes birds and wishes Europe had more of them, in that vague way of the comfortable urban naturalist shielded from the realities of the nature he adores. He dislikes right-wing populism, yet he very much likes virtue-signalling that fact. Most of all, he is rather indifferent to Bach’s music and its German cultural context, instead treating it like the work subject we know it was. He does not even bother to hide the fact that the ‘walk’ he takes in Bach’s footsteps is mostly a series of train and taxi short-cuts to the next hotel.
Perhaps not much is known of Bach or his walk to Lubeck, and so Clare had not much to tell without drifting fully into fiction-writing? Perhaps the very idea of walking in Bach’s long-erased footsteps was a silly one? Or perhaps the BBC documentary (that I did not watch) is well-edited in a way these field notes are not, and therefore tells that story much better?
In any event, we do learn something of Horatio Clare’s Art – specifically that he is prepared to put his name to a book that never ought been published; great tits, wood pigeons and all.
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