Bach's Musical Universe

December 23, 2019
The celebrated 18th-century German composer Johann Sebastian Bach was the great brainiac of classical music, according to this dense scholarly study. Harvard music historian Wolff (Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician) styles Bach a musical intellectual whose hallmarks were “swift mental processing of complex musical considerations” and “meticulous rationalizations of the creative act,” all bent toward perfecting the complex counterpoint of polyphonic voices that snake and twine through his music. This isn’t a full biography; instead, Wolff focuses on analyzing a group of landmark compositions, including the keyboard pieces in The Well-Tempered Clavier and the Goldberg Variations, the giant cycle of chorale cantatas for church services; the Brandenburg Concertos and the St. John and St. Matthew Passions. The book is quite technical and often bone dry as it delves into the details of compositional dating; issues of tuning, counterpoint, and instrumentation; the selection of texts for choral writing; and the revisions Bach made in pieces over the years. It’s full of music theory, tabularized data on the structures of compositions, and photos of Bach’s manuscript scores that convey little impression beyond how bewilderingly complicated they are. Readers with a serious musicological background will appreciate Wolff’s deep dive into Bach’s craft, but casual Bach-lovers will find it a heavy and not very tuneful slog.