New Bach Reader: A Life of Johann Sebastian Bach in Letters and Documents

Yo-Yo Ma
Just reading these documents brings this great composer to life in a most exciting and vivid way. I love this book!


Book Description
Through hundreds of letters, family papers, anecdotes, and records, the Bach Reader established a new approach to biography by offering original documents in impeccable translations. In The New Bach Reader, Christoph Wolff has incorporated numerous facsimiles and added many newly discovered items, reflecting the current state of scholarship about the composer's life and music. The readings in this volume provide an accurate and vivid picture of Bach's world and of his far-reaching influence.


About the Author
Christoph Wolff is the William Powell Mason Professor of Music and dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University.


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Gathered in this volume are all the letters, reports, testimonials, complaints, thank-you notes, and other writings of J. S. Bach, together with a generous helping of performance and payment inventories, town council proceedings, court and archival records, letters of appointment, and other papers that document the fabric of the composer's daily life. Here, in English translations that preserve the full flavor of the originals, we encounter more than four hundred items. The book also presents a complete translation of J. N. Forkel's landmark 1802 biography, On Johann Sebastian Bach's Life, Genius, and Works; a thorough chronology of events in the composer's life and career; a detailed genealogy and family tree that Bach himself prepared; an extensive obituary written by C. P. E. Bach and J. F. Agricola; facsimiles of a dozen music manuscripts, including working drafts; Romantic-era views of Bach; and a wealth of other materials.


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