Johann Sebastian Bach holds a singular position in the history of music. A uniquely gifted musician, he combined outstanding performing virtuosity with supreme creative powers and remarkable intellectual discipline. More than two centuries after his lifetime, Bach’s work continues to set musical standards.

The noted Bach scholar Christoph Wolff offers in this book new perspectives on the composer’s life and remarkable career. Uncovering important historical evidence, the author demonstrates significant influences on Bach’s artistic development and brings fresh insight on his work habits, compositional intent, and the musical traditions that shaped Bach’s thought. Wolff reveals a composer devoted to an ambitious and highly individual creative approach, one characterized by constant self-criticism and self-challenge, the absorption of new skills and techniques, and the rethinking of riches from the musical past.

Readers will find illuminating analyses of some of Bach’s greatest music, including the B Minor Mass, important cantatas, keyboard and chamber compositions, the Musical Offering, and the Art of Fugue. Discussion of how these pieces “work” will be helpful to performers—singers, players, conductors—and to everyone interested in exploring the conceptual and contextual aspects of Bach’s music. All readers will find especially interesting those essays in which Wolff elaborates on his celebrated discoveries of previously unknown works: notably the fourteen “Goldberg” canons and a collection of thirty-three chorale preludes.

Representing twenty-five years of scholarship, these essays—half of which appear here in English for the first time—have established Christoph Wolff as one of the world’s preeminent authorities on J. S. Bach. All students, performers, and lovers of Bach’s music will find this an engaging and enlightening book.

Gregory Butler focuses on Bach's Concerto for Harpsichord and Strings in E Major (BWV 1053) as a pastiche created by a process of assemblage of three earlier heterogeneous movements. Pieter Dirksen delves into the source history of the Concerto for Harpsichord and Strings in F Minor (BWV 1056) and concludes it represents a transcription of an earlier violin concerto in G minor. David Schulenberg investigates the generic ambiguity of the concerto in the early eighteenth century and how it diverged from the sonata to become a distinct genre. Completing the volume is Christoph Wolff's examination of the ""Siciliano"" as a slow movement in Bach's concertos and its implications for the source history of his Concerto for Harpsichord and Strings in E Major (BWV 1053).

This anthology of 55 keyboard works provides an instructive picture of the music of the young J. S. Bach within the context of a spectrum of works by his elder contemporaries.

The Andreas Bach Book and the so-called Möller Manuscript, the most important sources for the young Bach’s keyboard music, were compiled in the early eighteenth century by Bach’s eldest brother and only keyboard teacher, Johann Christoph Bach of Ohrdruf, himself a pupil of Johann Pachelbel. The significance of the two manuscripts lies not only in their close connection to J. S. Bach (as evidenced by Bach autographs in both books), but equally in the fact that they contain some of the most outstanding keyboard music by Bach’s North German colleagues: Georg Böhm, Dietrich Buxtehude, and Johann Adam Reincken. While some of these compositions have been published in modern editions, others have been entirely overlooked.

This anthology presents keyboard works by the young J. S. Bach which are either little known or are earlier versions of better known works (for example, the Passacaglia in C Minor, BWV 582). Also included are all the unpublished keyboard works in the two manuscripts, as well as works by lesser known composers for which modern editions are not easily accessible. Rounding out the picture are works by well-known contemporaries for which the transmission in the young Bach’s circle proves particularly significant.

Intended for both player and scholar, this edition offers the texts of the two manuscripts in an easy to read layout that emphasizes the clarity of the counterpoint. Of particular interest to organists is the presentation of the organ works in the appropriate notion of the time, on two staves with the pedal voice integrated in the bass staff.