Volume 52, Number 7 · April 28, 2005
Mystery Man
By Joseph Kerman
The Life of Bach
by Peter Williams
Musical Lives Series/Cambridge University Press, 219 pp., $60.00; $21.99 (paper)
A shilling life will give you all the facts, wrote Auden, and many have echoed him, including more than one writer in The New York Review, but when it comes to Johann Sebastian Bach what you get for twenty-two dollars in the Cambridge Musical Lives Series is a tissue of excellent speculation. Like Shakespeare—and many have made the comparison, including the composer's latest biographer, Peter Wil-liams—Bach suffers from underdocumentation. The accumulation of every piece of paper mentioning or concerning him during his lifetime, ranging from official documents penned by himself to reviews, lists, testimonials, receipts, and mere name-drops, fits onto two hundred pages in the basic source book, updated a few years ago as The New Bach Reader.[1]
Review, 2668 words
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