For many Australians, the first contact with the music of Bach would have come with the publication in 1932 of The Children’s Bach, edited by Professor E.Harold Davies of Adelaide. It comprised 20 short pieces Bach wrote for his own ‘family use’. Davies dedicated his modest volume “to the children of Australia in the hope that they will find in it the beginnings of a life-long love and appreciation for the greatest music-composer of all the ages”.

The Children’s Bach at Canberra International Music Festival. Photo © Peter Hislop

The Children’s Bach is also the title of the acclaimed novella by Helen Garner, first published in 1986, with three further editions since then. It revolves around the lives of a Melbourne couple, Dexter and Athena Cox, and their two boys. In Glenn Perry’s compressed yet eloquent libretto for Andrew Schultz’s opera, we meet only one boy, Billy, who has a form of autism and whose principal engagement with the world of sound appears to be by means of the family upright piano.

Into an already strained domestic environment strides Elizabeth, an old flame from Dexter’s university days,...