Bach and The Tuning of the World

Everyone has heard of Johann Sebastian Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier - but hardly anybody knows anything about his journey to F sharp major. In March of 1700, shortly before his fifteenth birthday, Johann Sebastian Bach set off on his journey. His destination: to create perfect music, music that unites heaven and earth in harmony. His search finally brought him to Lübeck, where he became acquainted with Andreas Werckmeister and the well-tempered tuning. In this tempering - and that is new! - you can play everything, all keys, in major and minor. But perfection has its price: All notes are "tempered" a bit, which means falsified; the music has a touch of artificiality from now on. And not only the notes and pitches - nature and people are also being tempered. Gardens are laid out with geometric precision, rivers are canalized, cities redesigned. Night becomes day thanks to street lighting, the pocket watch makes it possible to take along the time with you, the tuning fork enables choral pitch. The journey into an artificial world has begun. When Bach completed the Well-Tempered Clavier, he was overcome with profound doubt: Is not his work "only of this world" - perfect, artificial, profane? "For us, Bach's life consists primarily of biographical gaps. We know some things; but we don't know much. These gaps offer a novelist his chance. The facts were my fetters but they were also my source of inspiration. I did not invent anything 'freely' in the meaning of arbitrarily, though." Jens Johler "Jens Johler by no means turns the historical facts around.... Instead, he is writing a great of development novel in which private motifs and the course of time intertwine like fugue themes. " Harald Asel, rbb Inforadio

Jens Johler, born in Neumuenster in 1944 and raised in Hamburg, now lives in Berlin. After several years of being trained and then working as an actor in Munich and Dortmund, he finally became a free-lance writer and, in addition to novels and thrillers, has written for the stage.

March 1722 1.Departure 2.Wicked Witchcraft 3.The Philosopher 4.Latin School 5.The Lion of Eisenach 6.The Three Musics 7.Adam Reincken 8.'That False Serpent, Opera' 9.The Muse 10.Circe 11.'It's the Affections that Matter' 12.'I Will Give my Heart to Thee' 13.Lackey 14.The Journey to F Sharp Major 15.Going South! 16.Evening Concerts 17.Angela 18.Mare Balticum 19.Dorothea Catrin 20.The New Tempering 21.'Strange Tones' 22.The Loft 23.The Consistory 24.The Wedding 25Curious Variations 26.The Ratswechsel Cantata 27.Weimar 28.Exult! Rejoice! 29.The Hunting Cantata 30.Black Birds 31.The Contest 32.Senesino 33.The Manuscript 34.The Loyal Subject 35.Landrichterstube 36.The Lord Chamberlain 37.Köthen 38.Handel 39.The Masterpiece 40.The Arrow 41.'Why Did You Leave Me?' 42.Praise from the Master 43.The Well-Tempered Clavier 44.Channelled Notes 45.The Night 46.H-C-A-B 47.Father and Son 48.The St Matthew Passion Fact and Fiction