Bach: Essays on His Life and Music

Johann Sebastian Bach holds a singular position in the history of music. A uniquely gifted musician, he combined outstanding performing virtuosity with supreme creative powers and remarkable intellectual discipline. More than two centuries after his lifetime, Bach's work continues to set musical standards. The noted Bach scholar Christoph Wolff offers in this book new perspectives on the composer's life and remarkable career. Uncovering important historical evidence, the author demonstrates significant influences on Bach's artistic development and brings fresh insight on his work habits, compositional intent, and the musical traditions that shaped Bach's thought. Wolff reveals a composer devoted to an ambitious and highly individual creative approach, one characterized by constant self-criticism and self-challenge, the absorption of new skills and techniques, and the rethinking of riches from the musical past. Readers will find illuminating analyses of some of Bach's greatest music, including the B Minor Mass, important cantatas, keyboard and chamber compositions, the Musical Offering, and the Art of Fugue. Discussion of how these pieces "work" will be helpful to performers-singers, players, conductors-and to everyone interested in exploring the conceptual and contextual aspects of Bach's music. All readers will find especially interesting those essays in which Wolff elaborates on his celebrated discoveries of previously unknown works: notably the fourteen "Goldberg" canons and a collection of thirty-three chorale preludes. Representing twenty-five years of scholarship, these essays-half of which appear here in English for the first time-have established Christoph Wolff as one of the world's preeminent authorities on J. S. Bach. All students, performers, and lovers of Bach's music will find this an engaging and enlightening book.

Table of Contents:
Preface Abbreviations OUTLINES OF A MUSICAL PORTRAIT New Perspectives on Bach Biography The Family Decisive Career Steps Employers and Patrons Buxtehude, Bach, and Seventeenth-Century Music in Retrospect Bach and Johann Adam Reinken: A Context for the Early Works Vivaldi's Compositional Art, Bach, and the Process of "Musical Thinking" Bach and the Tradition of the Palestrina Style NEW SOURCES: BROADENED PERSPECTIVES The Neumeister Collection of Chorale Preludes from the Bach Circle Bach's Audition for the St. Thomas Cantorate: The Cantata "Du wahrer Gott und Davids Sohn" Origins of the Kyrie of the B Minor Mass The Reformation Cantata "Em feste Burg" The Handexemplar of the Goldberg Variations Bach's Personal Copy of the Schubler Chorales The Clavier-Ubung Series Text-Critical Comments on the Original Print of the Partitas Bach's Leipzig Chamber Music New Research on the Musical Offering Bach's Last Fugue: Unfinished? The Compositional History of the Art of Fugue The Deathbed Chorale: Exposing a Myth CONCEPTS, STYLE, AND CHRONOLOGY Chronology and Style in the Early Works: A Background for the Orgel-Buchlein The Architecture of the Passacaglia The Organ in Bach's Cantatas Apropos the Musical Offering: The Thema Regium and the Term Ricercar The Agnus Dei of the B Minor Mass: Parody and New Composition Reconciled Principles of Design and Order in Bach's Original Editions Toward a Definition of the Last Period of Bach's Work EARLY RECEPTION AND ARTISTIC LEGACY On the Original Editions of Bach's Works Bach's Vocal Music and Early Music Criticism On the Recognition of Bach and "the Bach Chorale": Eighteenth-Century Perspectives "The Extraordinary Perfections of the Hon. Court Composer": An Inquiry into the Individuality of Bach's Music Notes and Postscripts Acknowledgments Index of Works by Johann Sebastian Bach Individual Compositions Collections Index of Archival Sources General Index

About the Author :
Christoph Wolff is Adams University Research Professor at Harvard University.

Review :
A fascinating and eminently readable account of many of the issues that have been uppermost in Bach research in recent years. Wolff has [produced] fundamental work about the composer, from his earliest music (‘newly discovered chorales’) to his last (Art of Fugue, parts of the B Minor Mass), sacred and secular, vocal and instrumental, all represented in this book… Every one of these essays…has the knack of presenting new information that triggers further thought… One does constantly sense a fresh conception of the composer. Not since Spitta’s monumental Johann Sebastian Bach has there been as refreshing a look at Bach’s work as in this collection of essays by one of the world’s preeminent authorities… Wolff’s essays on Bach are a must for every musician, whether layman, performer, or composer. For the latter the essays will provide especially valuable insights into the process of composition. What there is to know about Bach, Christoph Wolff knows. And everything Wolff…knows about Bach’s life, he has poured into this new and magisterial biographical portrait… [Bach] is user-friendly, helpful, and entertainingly informative. Direct and illuminating commentary on Bach’s major works, and on the major musical issues that Bach confronted, fill the book… [Wolff’s] main text surrounds the facts of Bach’s life with an invaluable sense of context—additional facts about musical life, courts, patronage, church doctrine, ecclesiastical and municipal politics… Wolff has provided every lover of Bach with a book to learn from. This volume will be useful not only to conductors, performers, and scholars, but to other listeners, myself included, who will be stimulated by it to find ever deeper levels of meaning in Bach’s many-splendored genius… Christoph Wolff functions here as a philologist and palaeographer deciphering a complex manuscript, as a biographer contemplating the mysteries of continuity and change in the composer’s long and productive career, as a demythologizer reviewing the legends about Bach with which we all grew up, as a social and intellectual historian placing the musical oeuvre into its total context, as a sensitive listener who even after all these years of research has not lost the capacity to hear and admire the miracle that is the music of Johann Sebastian Bach.