This biography portrays Bach as the living, breathing, and sometimes imperfect human being that he was, while using all the advances of Bach scholarship. The author demonstrates the connection between the composer's life and his music and looks at both in the context of the time.[...]
"I now stand at the gateway to my fortune," Mozart wrote in a letter of 1790. He had entered into the service of Emperor Joseph II of Austria two years earlier as Imperial-Royal Chamber Composer--a salaried appointment with a distinguished title and few obligations. His extraordinary subsequent outp[...]
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, r[...]
Although we have heard the music of J. S. Bach in countless performances and recordings, the composer himself still comes across only as an enigmatic figure in a single familiar portrait. As we mark the 250th anniversary of Bach's death, author Christoph Wolff presents a new picture that brings to l[...]
Mozart's unfinished Requiem has long been shrouded in mystery. Mozart undertook the commission for an Austrian nobleman, little knowing that he was to write a requiem for himself. Inevitably, the secrecy surrounding the anonymous commission, the circumstances of Mozart's death, the unfinished state [...]
"Eine fundierte Biographie des führenden Bach-Spezialisten Christoph Wolff. Das Leben Johann Sebastian Bachs und die Bedingungen seiner Zeit sind höchst anschaulich dargestellt, sein musikalisches Werk wird so eindringlich beschrieben und analysiert, daß das Lesen sogleich zum Hören verlockt. ""[...]