The Life of Bach (review)

Peter Williams's The Life of Bach, the fourteenth volume in Cambridge University Press's ongoing Musical Lives series, enters a densely populated, historically rich, and historiographically complex field of research. Following the findings of Alfred Dürr and Georg von Dadelsen in the 1950s which cast new light on the chronology of Johann Sebastian Bach's compositional output, the classic biographies of Bach by Philipp Spitta and Albert Schweitzer have necessarily been regarded as problematic in as much as they convey inaccurate descriptions of the composer's creative life (Philipp Spitta, Johann Sebastian Bach [Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1873-1880], and Albert Schweitzer, J. S. Bach: Le musicien-poète [Leipzig, Breitkopf & Härtel, 1905]). In addition, critics have amply demonstrated the intellectual problems with the concept of master narratives perpetuated in biographical works cast in the tradition of nineteenth-century scholarship, particularly of historic western-European men (for a summary of these issues, see Jolanta T. Pekacz, "Memory, History and Meaning: Musical Biography and its Discontents," Journal of Musicological Research 23 [2004]: 39-80). Given the difficulty of the task, Williams's volume is a significant contribution to the literature on Bach's life and works, offering as it does the valuable perspective of a scholar long engaged in understanding the composer's music.

The concise format of the Musical Lives series, whose volumes are generally about 200 pages in length, is well-suited to Williams's close focus on the biographical evidence found in Bach's music and the obituary of the composer written shortly after his death in 1750 by his son C. P. E. Bach with Johann Friedrich Agricola. As Williams states: "because of the sparse biographical details, a life of Bach must pay especially close attention to his music, and I have therefore referred to the works themselves more often than authors of some other books in this series have done. This is partly to fill in the chronology, partly to imply what his interests were at particular moments" (pp. 1-2, emphasis added). Because of this approach, Williams suggests that his portrait of Bach is more likely to present an accurate image of Bach, unclouded by the "ephemeral interests of our own time" (p. 3).

This emphasis on the most primary of source material is perhaps the most distinctive feature of this biography, where Williams otherwise considers the composer's life in the conventional periodization delineated by changes in his employment. Each of the volume's seven chapters deals with roughly a decade of Bach's life, discussing his youth, his first two professional positions in Arnstadt and Mühlhausen, his employment at the courts in Weimar, then Cöthen, followed by chapters on each of the three decades of Bach's time in Leipzig. Fragments of the obituary are used to introduce the themes discussed throughout the volume and are used to examine biographical threads that have become well known. What is noteworthy is Williams's emphasis on and reading of these details, and it would seem that many aspects of the volume are driven by the author's reactions to previous scholarship and his desire to offer a corrective to that work —particularly to Christoph Wolff's recent biography of Bach (Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician [New York: W. W. Norton, 2000]). For instance, Williams argues that Bach's knowledge of organs, as displayed in the composer's reports on examinations of new organs, can be traced as much to Andreas Werckmeister's treatise Erweiterte und verbesserte Orgelprobe (1698) as to the expert knowledge of one versed in the technology of one of the most sophisticated machines in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Europe (p. 41). More generally, Williams seems to be countering the hagiographic element common in Bach biography through his emphasis on the composer's "occasional weaknesses" (p. 2), and some of the less picturesque elements in Bach's society (for instance, proposing...