Matthew Passion, Art of Fugue, and B-minor Mass. Emerging from a complex and massive oeuvre, Bach’s Musical Universe is a focused discussion of a meaningful selection of compositions-from the famous Well-Tempered Clavier, violin and cello solos, and Brandenburg Concertos to the St. Wolff delves deeply into the composer’s own rich selection of collected music, cutting across conventional boundaries of era, genre, and instrument. In this companion volume to his Pulitzer Prize–finalist biography, Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician, leading Bach scholar Christoph Wolff takes his cue from his famous subject. These benchmark works, all of them without parallel or equivalent, produced a steady stream of transformative ideas that stand as paradigms of Bach’s musical art. Instead, he methodically organized certain pieces into carefully designed collections. Throughout his life, renowned and prolific composer Johann Sebastian Bach articulated his views as a composer in purely musical terms he was notoriously reluctant to write about his life and work. With this highly readable book, Wolff sets a new standard in Bach biography.A concentrated study of Johann Sebastian Bach’s creative output and greatest pieces, capturing the essence of his art. And throughout, we see Bach in the broader context of his time: its institutions, traditions, and influences. Wolff demonstrates the intimate connection between the composer's life and his music, showing how Bach's superb inventiveness pervaded his career as a musician, composer, performer, scholar, and teacher. Now available in paperback, this engaging biography portrays Bach as the living, breathing-and sometimes imperfect-human being that he was, while bringing to bear all the advances gained in the last half-century of Bach scholarship. Published in 2000 to mark the 250th anniversary of Bach's death, author and leading Bach scholar Christoph Wolff presents a new picture that brings to life this towering figure of the Baroque era.

Bach through countless performances and recordings, the composer himself continues to come across as the somewhat enigmatic figure depicted in a single, familiar portrait. Although we are acquainted with the music of J.

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