Bach's Musical Universe: The Composer and His Work
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- $35.99
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- $35.99
Publisher Description
A concentrated study of Johann Sebastian Bach’s creative output and greatest pieces, capturing the essence of his art.
Throughout his life, renowned and prolific composer Johann Sebastian Bach articulated his views as a composer in purely musical terms; he was notoriously reluctant to write about his life and work. Instead, he methodically organized certain pieces into carefully designed collections. These benchmark works, all of them without parallel or equivalent, produced a steady stream of transformative ideas that stand as paradigms of Bach’s musical art.
In this companion volume to his Pulitzer Prize–finalist biography, Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician, leading Bach scholar Christoph Wolff takes his cue from his famous subject. Wolff delves deeply into the composer’s own rich selection of collected music, cutting across conventional boundaries of era, genre, and instrument. Emerging from a complex and massive oeuvre, Bach’s Musical Universe is a focused discussion of a meaningful selection of compositions—from the famous Well-Tempered Clavier, violin and cello solos, and Brandenburg Concertos to the St. Matthew Passion, Art of Fugue, and B-minor Mass.
Unlike any study undertaken before, this book details Bach’s creative process across the various instrumental and vocal genres. This array of compositions illustrates the depth and variety at the essence of the composer’s musical art, as well as his unique approach to composition as a process of imaginative research into the innate potential of his chosen material. Tracing Bach’s evolution as a composer, Wolff compellingly illuminates the ideals and legacy of this giant of classical music in a new, refreshing light for everyone, from the amateur to the virtuoso.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The celebrated 18th-century German composer Johann Sebastian Bach was the great brainiac of classical music, according to this dense scholarly study. Harvard music historian Wolff (Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician) styles Bach a musical intellectual whose hallmarks were "swift mental processing of complex musical considerations" and "meticulous rationalizations of the creative act," all bent toward perfecting the complex counterpoint of polyphonic voices that snake and twine through his music. This isn't a full biography; instead, Wolff focuses on analyzing a group of landmark compositions, including the keyboard pieces in The Well-Tempered Clavier and the Goldberg Variations, the giant cycle of chorale cantatas for church services; the Brandenburg Concertos and the St. John and St. Matthew Passions. The book is quite technical and often bone dry as it delves into the details of compositional dating; issues of tuning, counterpoint, and instrumentation; the selection of texts for choral writing; and the revisions Bach made in pieces over the years. It's full of music theory, tabularized data on the structures of compositions, and photos of Bach's manuscript scores that convey little impression beyond how bewilderingly complicated they are. Readers with a serious musicological background will appreciate Wolff's deep dive into Bach's craft, but casual Bach-lovers will find it a heavy and not very tuneful slog.
