About book Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician (2001)
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=1atQFL...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.
What sin the boring biography? On the one hand, this was often an extremely tedious book to read. On the other hand, I learned a lot of things I’m glad now to know about Bach’s life, and, by extension, the life of musicians in Lutheran Germany in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. On the one hand, Wolff’s portrayal of Bach only just qualifies as literary characterization; the other personages don’t get personalities. (C.P.E. Bach, however, is quoted enough to shine through as a dedicated, talented, and passionate son.) On the other hand, Bach was genuinely not inclined to pour out his thoughts and feelings in letters or conversation (unlike C.P.E.), and his era is a less documented one than later centuries. However, Wolff’s more subjective intrusions into his sober account of Bach’s life and music usually fall flat. While Wolff is not the first writer to argue that Bach and Isaac Newton are kindred spirits, I would appreciate it if he were the last. Yes, Bach’s compositions are often rigorous, highly formal, and pedagogical; but does this make him a musical “scientist” doing “research”? I don’t think so. There are also lousy passages on Vivaldi (unconvincing motivic analysis), suspiciously emphatic ones enlisting Bach as an academic intellectual (so is Wolff!), and gushy, redundant ones about Bach’s perfectly perfect contrapuntal perfection (not that I’d argue otherwise, but...).But. It’s a great reference for Bach-related information. Wolff’s colossal data dump does deserve a long shelf life and a few stars.
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Reading this book exposed a lot of my own failings. I don't know German or have a sophistocated understanding of music theory and history. But I really like to listen to the works of J.S Bach. So I read this biography in the hope of gaining a better understanding of the man and his music.Wolff's biography is designed for music scholars or for someone with a better understanding of music theory and composition than I have. Wolff spends a great deal of time and effort explaining how changes made by Bach changed music itself. To get the most out of this book, you need some expertise. Since Bach was German, all of the titles of the works appear in German with an occasional translation. However the major works like Mass in B minor, St. Matthew's Passion, The Well Tempered Clavier,and The Goldberg Variations are all referenced in English.Wolff uses Bach's obituary as a touchstone through out the work. Obviously, it is very difficult to write a biography of someone who lived in the 1700's. Wolff has throughly researched his subject by combing through business records, correspondence, newpaper articles, and letters to learn about Bach. As a reader, you appreciate Bach's genius but also become aware of the politics of the time and the living conditions in the 1700's. It is sad that when Bach died, his widow and remaining minor children were not better taken care of by the town fathers. It is also tragic that so much of what Bach wrote has been lost. He was recognized as a genius in his own time. Yet his estate was divided among his adult children and his widow. His widow had to sell the compositions that he had left to her so she would be able to take care of herself and the children. Bach had 13 children. His first wife died young and left him with four young children. He remarried and had nine children with his second wife. He died when he was 66. Bach passed his musical gifts on the a couple of his sons. Like Bach they secured postions as cantors or organists for the Luthern churches in Germany. His son Carl Phillip Emmanuel Bach is responsible for much of Bach's music that survived the centuries.Reading this biography, makes one wish that just for a Sunday, they could hop in a time machine and be present to hear Bach the organ virtuoso play some of his own compositions in church at Lepizig!
—Mary
This unique biography offers the most comprehensive treatise on the Master and his work. Assembling the widest possible material, it´s publishing was a major event and it rightly deserves all its prize. Must read for any music lover and musician above all.
—Richard Pohl
Well, I finally got around to finish this one up, and by finish, I mean flip through the last half of the book looking for the parts of interest to me. The sections on his construction of some of his longer pieces (Goldberg, Well-Tempered Clavier, Art of Fugue) were a little interesting, but the book disappointed me on a whole, especially after Maynard Solomon's "Mozart: A life," which I found highly engaging. "Bach" spent a lot of itself beginning sentences, "He could have..." and the like, to fill in for the lack of information as to the composers early life, and was generally painful to read. Even if you are completely absorbed by his music, there is only so much you can really absorb about organ building and design before things get tedious. Wolff's take on the life of this legendary composer seemed to lack any passion what-so-ever, and dragged on and on until it finally petered out with a few pages about Bach's death: "We cannot reconstruct what actually happened on Bach's deathbed ..."
—Mark
