Most portraits do not receive a serenade when they’re about to travel, but this is not most portraits.
A 1748 painting of Johann Sebastian Bach, the most significant and well-preserved likeness of the great composer, has hung for more than 60 years in a modest living room here, part of the distinguished collection of the philanthropist William H. Scheide, who died last November at 100.
Sent off in styleEarly next week, as Scheide had instructed in his will, it will fly home to Leipzig, Germany, where Bach spent the final decades of his life and the Bach archive has its headquarters and a small museum.
But not before being sent off in style: On Wednesday morning, a crowd that included the mayor of Leipzig and Germany’s Consul General in New York gathered around the painting to sip champagne and listen to the lustrous harmonies of two of the master’s chorales, sung by the Monteverdi Choir and conducted by John Eliot Gardiner.
For Mr Gardiner, it was more than a purely musical reunion. Before he became one of the world’s great Bach conductors, in fact before he was born, the portrait, painted by Elias Gottlob Haussmann, was moved to his parent’s home in Dorset, England, for safekeeping after the outbreak of World War II. Mr Gardiner, born in 1943, grew up passing it on the stairway landing. “Every night on my way to bed, I tried to avoid its forbidding stare,” he wrote in his 2013 study of the composer, Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven.
In the portrait, a bewigged, thickset Bach gazes warily at the viewer while holding the score for one of his canons. He has, Mr Gardiner writes, the look of a man etched with life’s travails — beetle-browed, with shallow eye sockets, asymmetrical eyes and slightly droopy eyelids.
Clues to the composerMr Gardiner locates in the painting slight yet telling clues to the composer’s personality, writing of the fleshy lips and jowls that suggest a fondness for food and wine, as the records imply and how astutely Haussmann had captured opposed facets of his subject’s character: the serious and the sensual.
The painting owned by Scheide, a lifelong admirer of the composer who founded the Bach Aria Group, a renowned performing ensemble, in 1946, is the slightly later of two versions by Haussmann. Before Bach died, he passed the second portrait to his son Carl Philipp Emanuel, and it is included in the late-18th-century inventory of the estate of C.P.E. Bach’s widow. Its history then gets hazy for the better part of 100 years, but the painting reappeared in the possession of a family in Lower Silesia (part of present-day Poland) late in the 19th century.
It stayed there until Europe teetered on the edge of World War II, when a descendant of the family that owned it, Walter Jenke, fled the rise of the Nazis and arrived in Dorset, where he had an old friend from a youth camp in Germany: Gardiner’s father.
Transferred to the Gardiners when hostilities broke out and Jenke, as a German, was interned on the Isle of Man, the portrait was bought by Scheide in 1953.
Meanwhile, Gardiner became one of the eminent musicians of his generation, particularly prized for his vibrant interpretations of early music. He founded the Monteverdi Choir in 1964 and the English Baroque Soloists in 1978. — New York Times News Service
