Bach
A Musical Biography
- Author: Williams, Peter
A big read, stimulatingly rigorous, and an excellent follow-up from Williams's concise Life of Bach (2004)
Bach
A Musical Biography
- Author: Williams, Peter
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A big read, stimulatingly rigorous, and an excellent follow-up from Williams's concise Life of Bach (2004)
About
J. S. Bach composed some of the best-loved and most moving music in Western culture. Surviving mostly in manuscript collections, his music also exists in special and unique publications that reveal much about his life and thoughts as a composer. In this book, Peter Williams, author of the acclaimed J. S. Bach: A Life in Music, revisits Bach's biography through the lens of his music. Reviewing all of Bach's music chronologically, Williams discusses the music collection by collection to reveal the development of Bach's interests and priorities. While a great deal has been written about the composer's vocal works, Williams gives the keyboard music its proper emphasis, revealing it as crucial to Bach's biography, as a young organist and a mature composer, as a performer in public and teacher in private, and as a profound thinker in the language of music.
Contents
- Part I . Life and Works:
- 1. Early years, 1685-1703: background, family, studies;
- 2. First appointments, 1703-1708: a young musician's activities and early works;
- 3. Weimar, 1708-1717: the gifted player at a ducal court;
- 4. Coethen, 1717-1723: other opportunities for the maturing composer;
- 5. Leipzig, the first years: a cantor's life, his duties, cantatas, Passions, publications;
- 6. Leipzig, the middle years: other activities;
- 7. Leipzig, the final years: a concentration on the language of music;
- Part II . Observations on the Life and Works:
- 8. What was said, what can be inferred;
- 9. An epilogue.
Awards and reviews
A big read, stimulatingly rigorous, and an excellent follow-up from Williams's concise Life of Bach (2004)
the reader must be prepared to put in the hours to find these things. The going is not always easy, and the mixture of forensically researched and ingeniously practical considerations on which Williams bases his speculations are many and various, with many a tangent taken along the way. No doubt it is inevitable that a mind so crammed with Bachian detail should wander off the point from time to time, but the sheer accumulation of meticulously considered observations eventually makes its mark, leaving one in renewed wonder at this astonishing composer's compulsive intellectual drive, rumbling life-force and superhuman ability to move listeners with the sheer power of organised musical notes
The joy of this [...] book is the human touch that underlines the title, a musical biography ... Not only a fascinating read but brings a great composer and his art brilliantly to life
