J. S. Bach: A Life in Music
Researched Bibliographic Dossier
Verified edition data and a musicological research note prepared specifically for this work.
- Title
- J. S. Bach: A Life in Music
- Author
- Peter Williams
- Edition
- First hardback edition
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press
- Place
- Cambridge and New York
- Year
- 2007
- Extent
- 418 pages; 2 maps and music examples
- ISBN
- 9780521870740
- Language
- English
- Type
- Scholarly biography / musicological interpretation
SCOPE & CONTENT
Williams approaches Bach’s biography from a deliberately questioning position. Rather than repeating the traditional life story as a chain of secure facts, he re-examines the eighteenth-century obituary and later biographical assumptions in the light of documentary evidence and of what the music itself suggests about Bach’s priorities. The title “A Life in Music” is programmatic: Bach’s works are treated not merely as products placed alongside his career but as evidence of a life spent performing, composing, teaching, testing instruments and responding to different German, Italian and French traditions.
RESEARCH VALUE
The chronological chapters cover the early years, Arnstadt and Mühlhausen, Weimar, Köthen and the successive phases of Leipzig, followed by broader observations and a postscript. Williams’s specialist knowledge of keyboards and organ culture gives particular weight to questions of performance, instruments, style and compositional craft. The book is valuable precisely because it resists excessive certainty: it repeatedly distinguishes documentation from inference and encourages readers to reconsider inherited Bach mythology. It is best read alongside Christoph Wolff and primary-document collections for a broader view of current Bach biography.
- Catalogue completeness
- 8 / 10 core bibliographic fields