Opening sentences..................

 

I grew up under the Cantor's gaze.  The celebrated Haussmann portrait of Bach had been given to my parents for safekeeping for the duration of the war, and it took pride of place on the first-floor landing of the old mill in Dorset where I was born.  Every night on my way to bed I tried to avoid its forbidding stare.

-John Eliot Gardiner, Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven

thanks Kurt