Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Published to mark the 250th anniversary of J.S. Bach's death, this landmark biography by the leading Bach scholar presents a new picture of the composer that brings to life this towering figure of the Baroque era. Throughout, Christoph Wolff demonstrates the intimate connection between Bach's life and his music, showing how the composer's superb inventiveness pervaded his career as a musician, composer, performer, scholar, and teacher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

A leading Bach scholar, dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard, offers a comprehensive biography in time for the 250th anniversary of Bach's death. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

Since this year is the 250th anniversary of the death of the composer now widely regarded as perhaps the most consummate musician who ever lived, it is an opportune moment for a major study of the man and his work by one of the leading authorities on both. While shedding no new light on Bach's life, Wolff, a Harvard professor of music, does offer the lay reader a thorough picture of the composer as both a technician and a surpassing artist. He describes how Bach (1685-1750) made a living in his early years traveling around testing and repairing church organs. Wolff devotes a great deal of space to examining how Bach was viewed by his contemporaries, to whom, of course, the idea of a musician as an artist--as opposed to a sort of scientist of sound (there are valuable comparisons of Bach's achievement to that of his contemporary, Isaac Newton)--was quite foreign. Wolff has excavated contemporary documents, giving remarkable detail on Bach's earnings and on the disposition of his manuscripts after his death to the various members of his multitudinous family; also included are charming examples of the musician's youthful zeal, such as his journey, 250 miles on foot, to see and hear the admired organist/composer Buxtehude. So much of the composer's life is shrouded in mystery--what exactly caused the death of the remarkably healthy Bach in his 66th year, and just where is he buried? (no tombstone marks the spot)--that although this study is certainly the last word in current Bach scholarship, the man behind the music remains infuriatingly elusive. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

CHOICE Review

Wolff's volume is perhaps the most important of the books in English published on Bach in this 250th anniversary year of his death. Since his "New Grove Bach Family" (in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 1980; published as a book of the same title, 1983), Wolff (Harvard) has been the leading Bach scholar writing in English. At the core of the new Bach scholarship are Wolff's Bach: Essays on His Life and Music (CH, Oct'91) and The New Bach Reader (CH, Nov'98)--a major revision and enlargement of the The Bach Reader, ed. by Hans David and Arthur Mendel (first published in 1945). The present title is full of stunning insights and connections. Personal documents are few, and most deal with business matters; thus, it takes contextual reconstructions to illuminate matters like Bach's family life and his relationships with colleagues and employers. All of the facts are here, and they are presented in a way that will fascinate all serious readers of biography. Wolff plans a complementary volume on Bach's individual works and his development as a composer. Not since Philipp Spitta's monumental two-volume Johann Sebastian Bach (1880) has there been such an important contribution to Bach scholarship, or indeed to musical scholarship in general. All collections. J. P. Ambrose; University of Vermont

Author notes provided by Syndetics

He is a William Powell Mason Professor of Music at Harvard University, is coauthor of the Bach Compendium.

(Bowker Author Biography)