A magnificent biography of one of the towering figures in classical music. Bach inspires me as he does so many and this biography is inspirational in its own way. It provides details that challenge the reader and yet, heeding this challenge pays off through the intensity of those details and the resulting increase in one's knowledge of Bach's life and music and its influence on subsequent musical development. ( )

2021 - As I work my way through [b:Year of Wonder: Classical Music for Every Day|35405026|Year of Wonder Classical Music for Every Day|Clemency Burton-Hill|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1507318390l/35405026._SX50_.jpg|56776210] this year, I thought it might be good to find a highly recommended biography for each composer and plop them onto a shelf.

I don't know if a person with my current music level can ever consider this book "read." The first sections involving the history and life of Bach are really interesting but this book is really intense. It is hard to make your way through unless you are already a Bach scholar. I have already forgotten 3/4the the information already and expect to lose the rest in the coming weeks because my brain is just not capable of remembering all the incredible details :) ( )

This is the classic biography of J S Bach and provides a wonderful overview of his life a work. I actually used the book as a travel guide when I took a tour of all of the places where Bach had worked. Based upon a reference in this book, I visited the city archives in Mullhausen and got to see the original employment contract of Bach as well as one of his travel expense reports. ( )

As Shakespeare was to literature or Newton was to Physics, Bach was to music - all three were figures of the 17th century who redefined and transcended the bounds of their contemporaries, and set up foundations on which so much is based. Although some of things they use have fallen out of practice, their contribution cannot be denied or erased.

And like Shakespeare, we don't know very much about the man himself. Of course there are libraries filled with their works and analyses of them alone, but only a few bare facts which leave us to speculate on the origins of genius. The largest extant contemporary source we have on Bach's life was his obituary, written by his son.

Wolff does his best to fill in the missing details, with information on the towns he stayed, his pay, the history of German states, and - the best part - musical analysis. I recommend sitting next to your computer with Youtube and listening along to the relevant parts.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1atQFLYbzuk

For example, the Passacaglia and Fugue. This is 20 variations of the same theme seen in the first few measures. Try and pick them out, it's fun!

In several fields, Bach expanded and completely transformed what came before him. He studied contemporary music exhaustively - Monteverdi, Pachelbel, Lully, Buxteheude - and outshone them all. Chorales, suites, organ works, Masses, the Passions of St. Matthew and St. John, Oratorios for Christmas and Easter. The Art of Fugue, an enormously complex and self-referencing work, used in the modern mathematics text Godel, Escher, Bach, was done in his spare time.

He made counterpoint and harmony and voice interact in ways which none had before, and few have since.

And yet he was only human. He ran several businesses and taught, and when we worked as a church organist for a time, he composed a chorale -EVERY WEEK- for the Sunday services. It is assumed that he wrote several cycles of these, a portion of which are lost. One of his few surviving letters is an angry complaint for a man to return his rented harpsichord, and a line from a secular Cantata that reads, "Without my coffee, I am a goat." But he was intensely religious, and there was something of the divine in him. Music is the highest form of worship, says he. His religious works make one believe in the beauty and form of the world and nature, if but for a moment.

Of the man, we can barely know anything. Of the works, we will never know everything. ( )