In a new book about Bach’s Cello Suites, award-winning author Edward Klorman dives deep into both the culture and history of the iconic works. Bach: The Cello Suites is published by Cambridge University Press on September 1, 2025. In this insider interview, we spoke with Klorman about the surprising history of the suites, the challenges of writing for a diverse range of readers who might end up reading the forthcoming book, and one thing he wishes he could have left in the book.
What made you so curious about Bach’s Cello Suites that you wanted to write a book?
A century ago, the Cello Suites were not very widely known. But now, you hear them all the time, not only in concerts, but also in films, on Netflix series, pop covers, in subway stations—you name it! I was curious how this music went from being so obscure to so ubiquitous and iconic, and I was eager to tell that story.
There are so many questions about them that resist straightforward answers. For instance, at which point in his career did he compose them? Did he write them for (or with) a particular cellist? Was Bach familiar with any other solo-cello music that may have inspired him? I wanted to try to get to the bottom of these questions as much as possible.
You are a violist. What was your experience with these suites for cello over the years?
Like many violists, I began on violin taking Suzuki lessons. The Suzuki violin books include four movements transcribed from the Cello Suites, so my first exposure to this music would have been in elementary school. But once I switched to viola in high school, I began learning one suite every year. The viola is tuned just like the cello, only an octave higher, so the suites adapt very well for the viola. In recent years, I’ve been lucky to play on a beautiful baroque viola with gut strings and a period-style bow, so it’s been an interesting challenge to relearn the suites in a different style.
According to his son C. P. E. Bach, J. S. Bach loved to play the viola, so sometimes we violists like to imagine that he might have used a viola to compose or perform the cello suites—but that is just conjecture!
What were some of the biggest challenges to writing the book?
A big challenge was writing for the diverse range of the readers.
This book is part of the New Cambridge Music Handbooks series. Each book explores a single piece for many kinds of readers, ranging from musicians and musicologists to musical audiences of all stripes. I try to keep the writing light and engaging for casual readers looking for an all-around guide to this wonderful music.
Then for cellists and cello teachers who played this music for decades, I provide detailed explanations of some thorny questions, like how do we know we are playing the notes, ornaments, and articulations Bach intended. (The answer is, it’s sometimes very difficult to know!) For these readers, I explain what evidence points me to various conclusions. By “showing my work,” I hope readers will come to feel that they can trust me and that they are welcome to re-evaluate sources to come to their own conclusions.
What's the one of the most surprising things you learned from the process?
Let’s start with the question, “what is a cello”? During Bach’s lifetime, instruments called “violoncello” came in many sizes and formats, some with more than four strings. Some were even held at the chest or shoulder, with the support of a strap. Many cellists in Bach’s orbit would have used an underhand bow hold, which is very different from the overhand hold used today.
It’s impossible to know precisely which kind of instrument or playing style Bach might have had in mind (or if he even had a specific approach in mind). In the book, I tell the story of musicians beginning to rediscover the Cello Suites starting around the 1860s. As I researched their performance history, I’m struck how musicians have constantly reinvented new ways they can sound and different ideas for approaching them. For instance, many nineteenth-century musicians added piano accompaniment to “update” Bach’s music to suite their audience’s tastes!
Were there any tidbits that did not make it into the final manuscript that you’d like to share?
There’s a very evocative description of a solo dancer dancing a sarabande that was published in a 1671 French–Latin dictionary by the Jesuit scholar François Pomey. It has been cited a lot because it’s such an uncommonly rich account, describing the dancer’s dramatic facial expressions, gestures, and so on. But in the course of my research, I learned that the musicologist Rose A. Pruiksma has discovered that this description was not based on an actual dancer witnessed by Pomey. Rather, it was plagiarized from a 1661 French novel by George de Scudéry.
Then there is the whole “controversy” about the claim that the Cello Suites were composed by J. S. Bach’s second wife, Anna Magdalena Bach, who was the scribe of an important manuscript copy of both the Cello Suites and the Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin. That claim got a lot of attention about a decade ago, but it’s been thoroughly debunked. Sometimes when you can run the risk of the so-called “boomerang effect, where fact checking a conspiracy theory can perversely have the effect of further spreading the conspiracy. So I left that out of the book and put my energy instead into highlighting the important roles many women have played in the history of the Cello Suites—as performers, transcribers, and teachers, just not as the composer!
