Julian Shuckburgh
Publisher who set up his own firm and wrote a highly original book on Bach’s work and personality
JULIAN SHUCKBURGH, who has died aged 81, was a publisher, writer and amateur musician; he achieved his best work as the author of Harmony & Discord: The Real Life of Johann Sebastian Bach (2009). Dissatisfied with weighty biographies of Bach which presented the composer not merely as the supreme musician but also as a pillar of virtue, Shuckburgh produced a portrait of a genius who was often touchy and difficult in his dealings with authority.
More than that, he presumed to put Bach’s compositions to the test. “Although much of his music is superb and masterly,” he wrote, “if you explore it all you will find that a lot of it is not.
“We would inevitably agree that many [of Bach’s works] are boring or troublesome or over-complex; and therefore it should be understood that, although he had unique talents in the wide ranges of music performance and composition, he was neither a perfectionist nor a full-time genius.”
In this Shuckburgh echoed the opinion of an 18th-century critic named Johann Scheibe, who wrote of Bach that “this great man would be the admiration of whole nations if he had more comfort, if he did not take away the natural element in his pieces by giving them a bombastic and confused style, and if he did not darken their beauty by an excess of artifice.”
In support of this view Shuckburgh assembled in an appendix a chronological list of all Bach’s works, awarding three stars for “masterpieces”, two stars for “superb work”, and one star for “excellent work”. The majority of compositions, however, including many of the cantatas, The Well-tempered Clavier, The Goldberg Variations and The Art of the Fugue, receive no stars at all.
In thus marking Bach’s work as though the composer were a talented but frequently disappointing pupil, Shuckburgh certainly displayed no shortage of self-confidence.
Yet his underlying reverence for Bach is evident. Very few people, after all, have matched his diligence in playing or listening to every one of the composer’s well over a thousand works.
His biography of Bach remains a formidable achievement. Even the appendix, for all its idiosyncrasies, is a valuable work of reference. As for the main text, the general reader will discover an approachable, original and securely sourced account of Bach’s often impenetrable existence.
John Julian Evelyn Shuckburgh was born in Ottawa on July 30 1940, the second child of Evelyn Shuckburgh and his wife Nancy Brett, a daughter of the 3rd Viscount Esher.
Sir Evelyn Shuckburgh (as he became in 1959) was a distinguished diplomat: private secretary to Sir Anthony Eden at the Foreign Office in the early 1950s and Ambassador to Italy from 1966 to 1969.
Fatherhood, however, seems to have been a less pressing concern. As with many other diplomatic families at that time, Julian was sent to boarding school aged six. Never encouraged to bring friends home, he found his principal delight in playing the piano and the cello.
At Winchester, Shuckburgh was distinguished rather for crosscountry running than for academic prowess, though his fine speaking of the role of Jesus in a performance of Dorothy Sayers’s The Man Who Would Be King in Winchester Cathedral is still remembered.
Proceeding to Peterhouse, Cambridge, he began to make his social mark, albeit at the expense of a third in Law. Indeed, Shuckburgh’s appearance and manner left little to be desired. Much in demand at dinner parties, where, with luck, his conversational ease might be matched by his piano and guitar playing – Noël Coward as well as Mozart – he rarely lacked for feminine admiration, even if the course of love did not always run smooth.
Music remained his prime interest. For more than 30 years he sang bass in the Bach Choir, directed by his father-in-law, Sir David Willcocks. Proficient at the harpsichord, he loved to play baroque chamber music.
He also conducted children’s opera performances, such as Benjamin Britten’s Noye’s Fludde, as well as renderings of Handel’s Fireworks Music on Guy Fawkes Night.
Meanwhile, Shuckburgh’s career in publishing prospered, as he proceeded from assistant editor at Methuen (1961-66) to academic editor at Weidenfeld and Nicolson, where he was made a director in 1969.
In 1978 he founded a book production company with David Reynolds which ran successfully for nine years. Shuckburgh Reynolds prepared handsome editions of such classics as Lark Rise to Candleford (a bestseller in 1983), Diary of a Nobody (1984), and an illustrated volume of the Gospels (1986). Shuckburgh himself edited two miscellanies entitled The Bedside Book (1979 and 1981).
Shuckburgh Reynolds’s most impressive contribution, published by Windward, and an outstanding work of reference, was Novels and Novelists:
A Guide to the World of Fiction (1980), edited by Martin Seymour-smith.
This book, besides containing chapters on the history and development of the novel, offered a list of some 1,300 authors, together with ratings of their best work, marked by Seymour-smith out of five for qualities of readability, characterisation, plot and literary merit.
So Bleak House, while scoring five stars for readability and literary merit, registers but four for characterisation and three for plot. Mansfield Park is adjudged one star short of the maximum 20; and Brideshead Revisited is awarded but two for characterisation and plot. However provocative, such ratings are constantly stimulating.
In 1987, Shuckburgh Reynolds merged with Barrie and Jenkins, with Shuckburgh as managing director. Later that year, Barrie and Jenkins was taken over by Century Hutchinson, which was in turn swiftly swallowed by Random House.
Barrie and Jenkins continued as a specialist imprint producing illustrated hardback books, including, in 1991, a fine edition of the Psalms.
After retiring from Barrie and Jenkins in 2000, Shuckburgh turned his attention to his study of Bach. He also produced the lavishly illustrated Spectacular London (2005).
Even in his sixties Shuckburgh still cut a dash, riding a powerful motorbike, his thick dark hair betraying no trace of silver, and his face youthful and unlined, notwithstanding a lifetime of smoking Gitanes.
In 2008, however, Shuckburgh was diagnosed with frontal lobe dementia. The initial prognosis was that he would be dead within four years, but Shuckburgh, supported by his children in his London home, proved the experts wrong. Though gradually losing the ability to recognise friends, he was able to play the piano until a year before his death.
Julian Shuckburgh married first, in 1963, Faith Wright; they had a daughter and a son but divorced in 1970. He married secondly, in 1975, Sarah Willcocks; they had two daughters and a son but divorced in 1992.
Julian Shuckburgh, born July 30 1940, died September 23 2021