Bach Musical Mystery

Award-winning historical novelist James Y. Bartlett has reimagined the great German composer and keyboard virtuoso Johann Sebastian Bach as a cross between Sherlock Holmes and Keith Richards in this imaginative new historical mystery. During a visit to the German city of Kassel to inspect the church’s newly constructed pipe organ, (based on an actual event in his life) Bach, his wife Anna Magdalena and his cousin and personal secretary Elias Bach (who serves as Dr. Watson to Bach’s Sherlock) discover that the pastor of the church may have murdered his young wife.

In 1736 Leipzig, Cantor Johann Sebastian Bach is feeling oppressed—the city council ignores him, his students are unruly and unappreciative, and the head of the St. Thomas School wants to eliminate the musical curriculum entirely. Then, after an ugly incident at a wedding, his prize student, the First Prefect of his four choirs, disappears. As Bach and his secretary/cousin Elias search the city for the boy, it appears that the school head and the mayor may be in league.

An ancient song composed by King David’s chief musician Asaph, discovered by the Teutonic Crusaders to the Holy Land, returned to Germany, then divided into four fragments and hidden to prevent the fearsome powers of God unleashed if the Song is ever played … This is the legend pursued by the 15-year-old Johann Sebastian Bach and his schoolmate Georg Erdmann in 1700 as they walk the 250 miles from their small town of Ohrdruf to the northern city of Lüneburg to join the St. Michael’s School choir.