Music and Letters

Bach's Musical Universe: The Composer and his Work represents Part II of Christoph Wolff's grand survey of the life and works of Johann Sebastian Bach. It has been long awaited, and it does not disappoint.

Part I, Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician, issued in 2000 on the 250th anniversary of Bach's death, focused on the composer's life. It was a remarkable achievement: a monumental biography that replaced Philipp Spitta's venerable nineteenth-century study and presented a new, updated image of Bach. In Wolff's account, Bach emerged as an independent artist in his last two decades, turning his back on the church and focusing on secular music-making, private projects, and intellectual pursuits. Spitta's Fifth Evangelist became Wolff's Distinguished Professor.

In Bach's Musical Universe, Wolff continues this line of thinking while dealing with the works themselves. He breaks new ground by considering Bach's accomplishments solely in terms of the composer's tireless quest to explore and summarize the major musical forms of his day. Freed from the burden of biographical and chronological speculation, Wolff cuts across genres and time periods to show the overarching strategies of Bach's compositional projects and just how intensely the great contrapuntist strove to achieve them. Bach's music has never been viewed in quite this way.

Wolff highlights the strategies by organizing the large works into seven groups and examining Bach's specific goals within each. But he first lays the groundwork for his approach in a prologue by considering what he terms 'Bach's business card': the six-part triple canon, BWV 1076, that Bach holds in the famous Haussmann portraits of 1746 and 1748. Resolved by inversion and requiring double, triple, and quadruple counterpoint, the canon reflects Bach's desire to present himself as the composer of intricate works rather than the organist and clavier player of European renown. To Wolff, this succinct piece is Bach's way of saying 'This is who I am, and this is what I stand for: the art of contrapuntal polyphony'. Then, using the music produced by the canon and Johann Friedrich Agricola's description of the unique qualities of Bach's compositional style in the obituary of 1750, Wolff lays out the underlying premiss of his book: that it is the ongoing application of counterpoint—as generator of 'ingenious ideas', as producer of 'all-embracing polyphony', and as liberator of harmony's 'most hidden secrets'—that forms the constant in Bach's output. The prologue is as much a tour de force as Bach's canon.

Wolff turns to the obituary once again as a source for grouping Bach's works, this time using the list of published and unpublished compositions provided by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. Wolff begins by looking at the roots of Bach's passion for compiling encyclopedic collections as it first emerged in the Orgel-Büchlein, Well-Tempered Clavier I, and Inventions and Sinfonias. These three pedagogical albums formed the foundation of Bach's method of keyboard instruction, and Wolff speculates that Bach submitted them as part of his application for the position of St Thomas Cantor in 1723, to serve as a substitute for book publications in his academic portfolio. The similarly didactic title-page inscriptions, added to the Orgel-Büchlein and Inventions and Sinfonias only around 1723, support this intriguing notion (the incomplete state of the Orgel-Büchlein—almost three-quarters of the scored pages stood empty—does not). Here and elsewhere, Wolff picks a few representative pieces from each collection to illustrate the compositional principles at work.

Wolff then proceeds to the instrumental 'opus collections', beginning with the keyboard Toccatas of the Weimar years (or earlier), which were handed down separately during Bach's lifetime but listed as a group of six in the obituary. He continues with the English and French Suites, the Unaccompanied Violin Sonatas and Partitas...