Bach: Essays on His Life and MusicHarvard University Press, 1991 - 461 páginas Johann Sebastian Bach holds a singular position in the history of music. A uniquely gifted musician, he combined outstanding performing virtuosity with supreme creative powers and remarkable intellectual discipline. More than two centuries after his lifetime, Bach's work continues to set musical standards. The noted Bach scholar Christoph Wolff offers in this book new perspectives on the composer's life and remarkable career. Uncovering important historical evidence, the author demonstrates significant influences on Bach's artistic development and brings fresh insight on his work habits, compositional intent, and the musical traditions that shaped Bach's thought. Wolff reveals a composer devoted to an ambitious and highly individual creative approach, one characterized by constant self-criticism and self-challenge, the absorption of new skills and techniques, and the rethinking of riches from the musical past. Readers will find illuminating analyses of some of Bach's greatest music, including the B Minor Mass, important cantatas, keyboard and chamber compositions, the Musical Offering, and the Art of Fugue. Discussion of how these pieces "work" will be helpful to performers--singers, players, conductors--and to everyone interested in exploring the conceptual and contextual aspects of Bach's music. All readers will find especially interesting those essays in which Wolff elaborates on his celebrated discoveries of previously unknown works: notably the fourteen "Goldberg" canons and a collection of thirty-three chorale preludes. Representing twenty-five years of scholarship, these essays--half of which appear here in English for the first time--have established Christoph Wolff as one of the world's preeminent authorities on J. S. Bach. All students, performers, and lovers of Bach's music will find this an engaging and enlightening book. |
Índice
New Perspectives on Bach Biography | 3 |
The Family | 14 |
Decisive Career Steps | 23 |
Employers and Patrons | 32 |
Buxtehude Bach and SeventeenthCentury Music in Retrospect | 41 |
A Context for the Early Works | 56 |
Vivaldis Compositional Art Bach and the Process of Musical Thinking | 72 |
Bach and the Tradition of the Palestrina Style | 84 |
Unfinished? | 259 |
The Compositional History of the Art of Fugue | 265 |
Exposing a Myth | 282 |
A Background for | 297 |
The Architecture of the Passacaglia | 306 |
The Organ in Bachs Cantatas | 317 |
The Thema Regium and | 324 |
Parody and New Composition | 332 |
BROADENED PERSPECTIVES | 105 |
The Neumeister Collection of Chorale Preludes from the Bach Circle | 107 |
The Cantata Du wahrer Gott und Davids Sohn | 128 |
Origins of the Kyrie of the B Minor Mass | 141 |
The Reformation Cantata Ein feste Burg | 152 |
Bachs Personal Copy of the Schübler Chorales | 178 |
The ClavierÜbung Series | 189 |
TextCritical Comments on the Original Print of the Partitas | 214 |
18 | 229 |
Principles of Design and Order in Bachs Original Editions | 340 |
28 | 359 |
On the Original Editions of Bachs Works | 371 |
Bachs Vocal Music and Early Music Criticism | 377 |
Notes and Postscripts | 399 |
Acknowledgments | 437 |
449 | |