Peter Williams - J. S. Bach: a Life in Music

Peter Williams approaches afresh the life and music of arguably the most studied of all composers, interpreting both Bach's life by deconstructing his original Obituary in the light of more recent information, and his music by evaluating his priorities and irrepressible creative energy. How, even though belonging to musical families on both his parents' sides, did he come to possess so bewitching a sense of rhythm and melody, and a mastery of harmony that established nothing less than a norm in western culture? In considering that the works of a composer are his biography, the book's title A Life in Music means both a life spent making music and one revealed in the music as we know it. A distinguished scholar and performer, Williams reexamines Bach's life as an orphan and a family man, as an extraordinarily gifted composer and player, and as an energetic and ambitious artist who never suffered fools gladly.

PETER WILLIAMs held the first Chair in Performance Practice in a British university (Edinburgh) and the first Arts and Sciences Distinguished Chair at Duke University, North Carolina. His books include The European Organ (1966), Bach: The Goldberg Variations (Cambridge, 2001), Figured BassAccompaniment (1970), The Organ in Western Culture 750-1250 (Cambridge, 1993), The Chromatic Fourth During Four Centuries of Music (1998) and The Organ Music of J. S. Bach (Cambridge, second edition 2003).

PETER WILLIAMS

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This approach to the imperfectly known work and life of Johann Sebastian Bach makes particular use of the Obituary (Nekrolog) in newly translated excerpts, as a thread leading through the maze of fact and conjecture about him. Presumed to have been drafted in the months following the composer's death and not published until some four years later, it joined two other obituaries in a periodical edited by one of his former Leipzig pupils (see List of references). A delay of four years was not uncommon at the time and need not imply faint public interest in its subject, although there does remain a question whether there had been difficulty in getting it published.