Reviews

J. S. Bach: A Life in Music, by Peter Williams. Cambridge and New York:

Cambridge University Press, 2007. xii, 405 pp.

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For much of the twentieth century, the idea of a new Bach biography was
more attractive than its reality. Bach scholars were (and continue to be) im-
mersed in the sources of his music, stylistic and compositional issues, theologi-
cal and liturgical matters, performance practice, reception, and a host of other
worthy topics. Biography seemed stale, and the relative paucity of documents
that illuminate Bach’s character or his musical thinking—in comparison to,
say, Beethoven—simply enforced its banishment to the academic backbench.
But a sheaf of new Bach biographies has brought to an end this period of rela-
tive fallow. Partly responsible are the two major Bach commemorations of re-
cent times: in 1985 on the three hundredth anniversary of his birth and in
2000 on the 250th anniversary of his death, occasions which also prompted
innumerable concerts and recordings. More crucial for the actual content of
the latest studies are the discoveries made since the last wave of biographies in
the early twentieth century: the new chronology of the vocal works, Bach’s
Calov Bible, the Neumeister Chorales, the Goldberg Canons, the Berlin Sing-
akademie archives, to name just a few. Peter Williams’s new biography joins a
growing list of such books, which reflect a variety of styles and approaches and
signal a moment of collective reassessment in Bach studies as a whole.1
J. S. Bach: A Life in Music benefits from its author’s long experience with
this music, both as scholar and as performer at the organ and harpsichord.2
More than his previous books, this biography makes clear Williams’s differ-
ences with more mainstream Bach scholarship, as practiced mostly by
American and German academics. A comparison with its two most substantial
competitors—Christoph Wolff ’s Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned

1. In addition to the volume under review, recent Bach biographies include: Malcolm Boyd,
Bach (London: Dent, 1983, and reissued numerous times, most recently by Oxford University
Press, 2006); Davitt Moroney, Bach: An Extraordinary Life (London: Associated Board of the
Royal Schools of Music, 2000); Christoph Wolff, Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician
(New York: Norton, 2000); Martin Geck, Bach: Leben und Werk (Reinbeck: Rowohlt Verlag,
2000), trans. John Hargraves as Johann Sebastian Bach: Life and Work (Orlando: Harcourt,
2006); and Peter Williams, The Life of Bach (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2004).
2. Among Williams’s many publications on the music of Bach are The Organ Music of J. S.
Bach, 3 vols. (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980–84); and Bach, The
Goldberg Variations (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
476 Journal of the American Musicological Society

Musician (2000) and Martin Geck’s Johann Sebastian Bach: Life and Work
(2006)3—is in fact quite instructive, revealing profound differences in both
general tone and specific content. Wolff ’s best-selling biography includes a
wealth of domestic and professional information plus orderly accounts of the
works but little criticism of the music. As others have observed, his book fol-
lows a grand tradition of Bach biographies in making the composer’s genius
its overriding theme, something the narrative strives constantly to affirm.
Similar in general outlook, Geck’s study (recently translated from the German

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original) offers multiple readings of the most important episodes in Bach’s life
and of many of the works (as a kind of ongoing Forschungsstand) but curi-
ously little summary judgment. In comparison, Williams is more concerned
with Bach’s musical “preoccupations” (p. ix) than with either his genius or his
historical significance.
The books are organized differently as well. Wolff discusses Bach’s life and
works in tandem, in discrete chapters whose boundaries are defined either by
geography or repertory, to which he appends a prologue and epilogue that
make much of Bach’s learned aspirations. Geck treats the life first, then the
music (with individual chapters on each genre), and finally offers various
“horizons” for interpretation. Williams, in both the present and an earlier
(shorter) biography,4 organizes his narrative around the obituary written by
C. P. E. Bach and J. F. Agricola (publ. 1754), which is here translated anew
and presented piecemeal, a sentence or two at a time, as a way of introducing
new sections. The constant circling back to this “official” version of Bach’s
life—one promulgated by his heirs and shaped by their culture’s expectations—
imposes a familiar (if somewhat gilded) frame on an otherwise probing narra-
tive. The approach works best for the keyboard and organ works (long of
great interest to Williams and, for the Obituary’s authors, the most viable part
of Bach’s output), but less well for the vocal works (which by the 1750s were
impractical and outdated); and it further obliges Williams to devote a final,
rather unwieldy chapter to the Obituary’s closing miscellany of “observations,
descriptions, [and] criticisms.” At the very least, it brings Bach biography full
circle (as it were) and makes for a novel reexamination of this oft-described
life.
Since Johann Nikolaus Forkel’s 1802 monograph on Bach, biographers
have struggled to depict this imperfectly known though crucial figure in the
history of Western music.5 Our desire to know more about Bach’s relation-
ships with family members, employers, colleagues, his temperament, even his

3. See note 1.
4. See note 1.
5. Even Philipp Spitta, author of the greatest of the nineteenth-century “monumental”
biographies of Bach, complained that “in so many questions connected with Bach’s life we find
ourselves thrown back on circumstantial evidence” (as translated by Clara Bell and J. A. Fuller-
Maitland, Johann Sebastian Bach: His Work and Influence on the Music of Germany, 1685–1750
[London: Ewer & Co, 1884], xiii).
 Reviews 477

vocabulary, has tempted the most scrupulous biographers toward decisions

based on the slimmest of evidence. Williams, one of the great skeptics of mod-
ern musicology, has made a career of avoiding such traps; hence his many
equivocations when Bach’s motivations or intentions are unclear. In some re-
spects, Williams’s Bach remains frustratingly elusive, but the constant ques-
tions and gentle shakedowns of important sources make us aware at least of
how Bach might have been viewed by his colleagues and peers, and that is
invaluable.

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Interestingly, it is by humanizing the other people in Bach’s life that
Williams brings us closer to the composer himself. The most striking example
of this is Williams’s rehabilitation of music critic Johann Adolf Scheibe.
Because the latter dared to criticize Bach, most biographers treat Scheibe as
a kind of bogeyman: a “twenty-nine-year-old upstart,” Wolff scoffs (on his
book’s opening page), whose “vitriolic” attack on the great composer was “ul-
timately inconsequential,” the whole episode “a tempest in a teapot.”6 Geck
likewise defends Bach by demonizing Scheibe: this “Young Turk” (!) writing
“from his perch in Hamburg” (never mind his long residency in Leipzig)
lacked the “good judgment” of Bach’s defenders in this famous controversy
over the style of his church music.7 Williams, ever the contrarian, begins dis-
passionately with a detailed summary of Scheibe’s original criticism and its
several rejoinders. Comparing the charges and countercharges, he observes
(correctly, I think) that “several of Scheibe’s original criticisms were not very
well answered” by J. A. Birnbaum and Lorenz Mizler (Bach’s mouthpieces in
this debate), and that “much of what Scheibe says in the original essay rings
true” (pp. 312–13). Allowing that Scheibe nursed a grudge against Bach
(who seems to have returned the favor with interest), Williams emphasizes the
more crucial issue here: for its time, Bach’s music was strange indeed.
Thus Williams accentuates the “nearly alienating” (p. 314) nature of some
of Bach’s most beloved works—not because they displease, but rather because
they demand so much of both performer and listener—and even dares to
identify a piece that supports Scheibe’s argument: the Prelude and Fugue in A
Minor, BWV 894 (pp. 315–16). In contrast, Wolff imposes a kind of critical
vacuum that insulates Bach’s music from its opponents: discarding the trou-
blesome Scheibe, he notes that Birnbaum effectively “overpowered his oppo-
nent” with the unassailable “concept of ‘musical perfection’ ” (a notion
central to Wolff ’s book but hardly germane to Scheibe’s complaint).8 Geck,
bizarrely, “cannot imagine that Scheibe really disliked Bach’s church composi-
tions,” despite the critic’s rather blunt views on this matter.9

6. Wolff, Bach: The Learned Musician, 1, 431.

7. Geck, Bach: Life and Work, 209–10, 213.
8. Wolff, Bach: The Learned Musician, 465.
9. Geck, Bach: Life and Work, 215.
478 Journal of the American Musicological Society

Williams’s philosophical differences with Wolff and Geck are equally clear
when it comes to more mundane biographical matters. Their respective treat-
ments of Bach’s Weimar imprisonment and its reputed connection with the
Well-Tempered Clavier is a case in point. Geck’s account comes straight from
the documents: having secured a new appointment in Cöthen, Bach asked to
be released from the Weimar court only to be jailed “for obstinate behavior
and forcing the question of his dismissal,” according to the court secretary.
Geck then accepts, without question, a jailhouse genesis for the WTC, barely

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suggested in a 1790 recollection by a Bach pupil, and he affirms that “early
versions of [the work] were indeed written in Weimar.”10 On the biographical
episode Wolff is more careful to shield our hero from his own bad self: Bach’s
frustration at the long wait for his dismissal “embroiled him in a situation
where he lost his temper,” after which “nothing apparently could save him
from serious trouble.” (The official charge of insubordination isn’t men-
tioned.) Like Geck, Wolff accepts that Bach began work on the WTC during
his Weimar incarceration.11 In contrast, Williams ponders what kinds of things
might have caused Bach to be accused of obstinacy and importunity: was it in-
ternecine squabbling at the Weimar court, professional resentment at having
been passed over as capellmeister, Bach’s absence at important events, or
something entirely different? Ratcheting down a notch or two the idea that
Bach began the WTC in jail, Williams also notes that the point of the oft-cited
recollection (reported by E. L. Gerber but originally from his father, who
studied with Bach) was simply to show that Bach “did not need a keyboard at
hand for composing even complicated counterpoint” (p. 123). This ability,
Williams reminds us, was what separated Bach from his peers, several of whom
had similarly unpleasant experiences with the law.
Do such moments make J. S. Bach: A Life in Music the definitive biogra-
phy? That depends on what one wants from such a book. When Wolff ’s
highly anticipated study was released during the millennial year, reviewers
were frank about both its virtues and its shortcomings. Much was made of
Wolff ’s fondness for superlatives and his emphasis on the more intellectual
(even “enlightened”) aspects of Bach’s work; even the precise English render-
ing of a German expletive became the subject of good-natured scholarly
debate.12 Several reviewers found echoes of Forkel in the shared tendency
to depict a transcendent Bach at the expense of a Bach more connected to
his time and place. What the world really needs, declared the writer for this

10. Ibid., 95–96. The recollection in question was published by Ernst Ludwig Gerber in his
Historisch-biographisches Lexikon der Tonkünstler (1790).
11. Wolff, Bach: Life and Work, 183–84.
12. See, for example, Robert Marshall, “In Search of Bach,” New York Review of Books 47,
no. 10 (15 June 2000): 47–51; John Butt, “The Saint Johann Sebastian Passion,” The New
Republic 223, nos. 2–3 (10 and 17 July 2000): 33–38; plus reviews of Wolff ’s book by David
Yearsley in this Journal 54 (2001): 374–82; and by Michael Talbot in Music and Letters 82
(2001): 622–26.
 Reviews 479

Journal, is for “someone to bring [Bach] back down to earth.”13 Others

complained that Wolff failed to deal critically with Bach’s compositional out-
put, and that his biography ignores the work of those who have tried to do
so.14 Equally serious complaints could be lodged against Geck, as I have sug-
gested above.
On the purely biographical front, Williams makes a good case for his hard-
working, preternaturally curious, uncommonly ambitious, if occasionally tem-
peramental Bach. The inner workings of Bach’s personality, on the other

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hand, are left largely to our imagination, as Williams encourages the reader to
consider a variety of potential explanations for his actions. On the ultimately
more important issue of the music, Williams proves a capricious guide, one
who enlightens as often as he irritates.
Though leery of close readings, he makes many interesting and pertinent
observations about particular works; most valuable are the constructive links
with music by Bach’s predecessors and contemporaries. These comparisons,
accompanied by few but telling musical examples, yield numerous insights
into the nuts and bolts of Bach’s musical style. In contrast, Wolff largely ig-
nores the question of style, and Geck’s organization by genre perpetuates a
kind of ex nihilo reading of Bach’s greatness in which stylistic analysis has no
place. Ever careful not to psychologize his subject, Williams nevertheless finds
pithy ways to describe how Bach might have thought about other music, from
Walther’s “literate [though] commonplace” figural organ chorales (p. 98) to
Kuhnau’s “homely suites” (p. 185). Some readers might find the frequent
comparisons with Handel puzzling, since he and Bach worked in radically dif-
ferent environments and their rivalry was important only posthumously, but
Williams’s point is well taken: both made conspicuous and consistent efforts
to keep abreast of the latest developments while never abandoning their re-
spective compositional roots.
Above all, Williams values the ingenuity of Bach’s music: its expressive
counterpoint, its clever mix of genres and styles, its searching harmonies. He is
not shy about criticizing Bach for an excess of art, even in pieces whose
canonic status is secure, and he smartly grounds such observations in his own
experience at the keyboard: the English Suites “try so hard . . . that a player
can soon find them less pleasurable and certainly less intimately suited to the
harpsichord than relatively brainless pieces by French composers” (p. 90). His
taste favors the beautiful surface over any kind of deep theological meaning,
and this colors his reading of the cantatas especially. About a penitential aria
from Cantata 115, for example, Williams allows that its poignant melody and
slow tempo might be described as “ ‘evoking shame’ or ‘picturing the ingrati-
atingly repentant,’ ” but he clearly prefers “the sheer sensuality of [its] ninths”

13. Yearsley, review, 382.

14. Butt cites in this regard the work of Yearsley, Ulrich Siegele, and Michael Marissen; see
“Saint Johann Sebastian Passion,” 36.
480 Journal of the American Musicological Society

to any kind of “pious words or associations” (pp. 91–92); in a later return to

the same work, he further maintains that Bach’s “very distinctive musical
sounds . . . are generally at a level of inspiration beyond mere words” (p. 190).
To each his own, of course, but the important thing to notice here is how
Williams tries to dehistoricize Bach’s music as somehow independent of any
outside agency or ideology. It’s ironic that one should find such views ex-
pressed in a biography, the one genre of scholarly writing where historical
context is normally privileged above other matters.

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Deeper forays into the music typically serve only to throw cold water on ei-
ther a particular reading or an entire mode of inquiry, and such things will
likely annoy those who take the bait. The substantial literature on Cantata
106, for example, gets a characteristic shrug: its “well-informed assemblage of
texts dealing with time and death” may have meant little to the young Bach,
who was simply “striving to do a professional composer’s job” with this
libretto (p. 63). In his epilogue Williams lobs a few more balls at the same
general target, rejecting the idea that “deep symbolism” is always present in a
cantata that moves from flats to sharps (pace Eric Chafe): such a thing is
“merely a natural progression from negative to positive, despair to hope”
(p. 369).15 And it’s not just theologically oriented scholarship that’s called
into question here: with a similar wave of the hand Williams dismisses recent
research into Bach’s use of concerto procedure, noting that “Bach scholars
seeking Vivaldi in the Brandenburgs might be looking for the wrong com-
poser” (p. 135). Other, more misguided modern “admirers” (note the care-
fully chosen noun) err when they hear Bach’s personal experiences or beliefs
manifested in the instrumental works: “In the slow movement of a . . . con-
certo they can feel the ‘expression of deep emotion’ and even, . . . [pace
Michael Marissen] his ‘political individualism’ ” (p. 373).16
Williams’s considerable musical expertise is evident everywhere, from his
frequent allusions to elements of the English choral tradition to the occasional
observation about contemporary Bach performance. The former strike this
reader as not only parochial but potentially confusing (see the rather strained
comparison of a Sunday liturgy in Leipzig to an Anglican evensong on
p. 186), while the latter range from the intriguing to the cranky. I am eager to
try Williams’s suggestion (on pp. 255–56) about playing the Musical Offering
on the fortepiano, given its Potsdam inspiration and the various options for
dynamics in this work. Ditto for his provocative idea about the Goldberg Aria:
why not let this limpid page, which lacks any kind of tempo indication, be a

15. The most obvious target of Williams’s remarks on BWV 106 is Eric Chafe: see his Tonal
Allegory in the Vocal Music of J. S. Bach (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 91–123.
Chafe’s latest book, Analyzing Bach Cantatas (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), is
driven mostly by the same kind of close readings of harmonic motion in these works.
16. Michael Marissen, The Social and Religious Designs of J. S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).
 Reviews 481

“light and playful” introduction to the whole (pp. 296–97)? On the other
hand, I’m a bit put off to read that I probably don’t know what I’m doing
with the Toccata, Adagio, and Fugue in C, BWV 564 (pp. 90–91), and I can
only promise to consider restraining my tempi the next time I lead a
Brandenburg Concerto (p. 78).
There are as well a few truly odd moments in the narrative, enough to keep
careful readers on their toes. The most jarring of these has got to be the dis-
cussion of public executions in Leipzig as a frame of reference for the Bach

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passions (pp. 201–2). Those who do as bid at the very beginning of this sec-
tion (its first sentence [p. 193] reads: “On the term ‘Passion,’ see Glossary”)
may well laugh out loud (as I did) upon seeing it defined “as in the Book of
Common Prayer, 1549” (p. 383). Are such doughty references really neces-
sary in a such a book? Williams even borrows an old saw from the venerable
Lives of the Saints: with the addition of the “so-called ‘deathbed chorale,’ ” the
Art of Fugue acquired “a highly desirable odour of sanctity” (p. 252).
Williams has more than a few linguistic tics, not the least of which are his
many rhetorical questions. The frequent Latinisms (e.g., the rhetorical figure
“tmesis,” p. 98), the ubiquitous “qv” (“quod vide” or “which see,” a directive
to the Glossary), and arresting vocabulary choices (“nimiety,” p. 117, bor-
rowed from Coleridge; “contumacy,” p. 146, to describe the typical obstinacy
of organists) make this book, on the surface at least, more learned than
Wolff ’s Bach: The Learned Musician. On the whole, however, Williams’s prose
is lucid and unstuffy, and sounds very much like a series of lively academic
lectures, which is probably where it started.
Surprisingly, the book lacks certain basic kinds of ancillary information
found in most biographies: there’s not a single picture of its subject, nor any
engravings or drawings of the places where Bach lived and worked, and pre-
cious little discussion of same. The only picture is on the dust jacket, where a
1760 painting of a Viennese court banquet (why?) gamely tries to interest the
casual browser. There are just two rather basic maps of the relevant areas for
Bach’s life preceding chapter 1, and no other visual help to understanding the
culture. The text is marred with more than a few typos (including several
pages with multiple mistakes), and the constant self-references to and fro are
more than a little clunky. A second edition should really be tweaked typo-
graphically as well, to ensure that certain sections of the book no longer look
like outlines. Additionally, the placement of musical examples is occasionally
arbitrary, and references to previous examples strain the reader’s patience. On
page 131, for example, we are directed back nearly a hundred pages, to an ex-
ample whose number is given but whose whereabouts are not.
Williams’s scholarly biases are evident in the frequent parenthetical notes,
which favor the Bach Jahrbuch and the Bach Dokumente to the virtual exclu-
sion of the New Bach Reader and most English-language Bach scholarship.
The rare footnote is even more telling: Williams makes room for detail on the
average price of a harpsichord in Bach’s day (p. 280, note 3) but he resists
482 Journal of the American Musicological Society

citing the work of most scholars with whom he has differences. And yet, the
book is likely the most brutally frank account of Bach’s career that we shall see
for some time. Though its author’s peculiarities are on full display, J. S. Bach:
A Life in Music will be much appreciated by those weary of the “Bach as
hero” narrative, and (best of all) it offers many new and powerful reasons why
this music deserves our continued attention.

MATTHEW DIRST

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Schoenberg’s Transformation of Musical Language, by Ethan Haimo. Music in
the Twentieth Century. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2006. xi, 430 pp.

Ethan Haimo’s impressive book tells a story of the period 1899–1909, in

which Schoenberg tries to establish himself as a young composer, reacts to his
critics, survives a marital crisis—and in which Anton von Webern signs a very
significant postcard. If this sounds like biography, it isn’t quite. Through judi-
cious analyses and meticulous consideration of historical sources, Haimo fol-
lows the stylistic twists and turns of a practically minded composer trying to
establish his standing as an important composer. In doing so, Haimo reenvi-
sions the terms by which we understand how Schoenberg’s musical language
evolved toward the style he declined to call “atonal.”
The book invites comparisons with Walter Frisch’s The Early Works of
Arnold Schoenberg, 1893–1908 in its repertory and its preference for com-
monly known analytical techniques over more specialized music-theoretical
tools.1 But where Frisch tries to understand each composition on its own
terms, Haimo focuses precisely on Schoenberg’s long-term compositional
evolution, arguing that Schoenberg advanced his style steadily during this pe-
riod through a principle Haimo calls “incremental innovation.” He is careful
to avoid treating Schoenberg’s evolution as goal-oriented, but his telling has
a dramatic trajectory, coming increasingly into conflict with established views
of Schoenberg and culminating in an argument against “the demonstrably
false assumption that ‘atonality’ is a meaningful or coherent category”
(p. 355). (Indeed, Haimo explicitly avoids the term “atonality” altogether in
the body of the book.) Schoenberg’s early period is usually thought to end
with the Second String Quartet, Op. 10 (1907–8), but Haimo includes an
additional year with The Book of the Hanging Gardens, Op. 15 (1908–9), the
Three Piano Pieces, Op. 11 (1909), and the Five Orchestral Pieces, Op. 16
(1909). Thus he includes three works commonly considered atonal and as-

1. Walter Frisch, The Early Works of Arnold Schoenberg, 1893–1908 (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1993).