Biographies of Johann Sebastian Bach
Many more were published in the 20th century by, among others, Albert Schweitzer, Charles Sanford Terry, Christoph Wolff and Klaus Eidam.
[1] There is little biographical material to be found in the compositions published during his lifetime: the glimpse perceived from the dedication of The Musical Offering to Frederick the Great being a small exception.
[4][5][6] Bach's entry in Johann Gottfried Walther's 1732 Lexikon is a rare exception in giving biographical information on the composer.
For the remainder of the century short biographies of the composer appeared in reference works like Johann Adam Hiller's Lebensbeschreibungen berühmter Musikgelehrten und Tonkünstler neurer Zeit,[9] Ernst Ludwig Gerber's Historisch-biographisches Lexikon der Tonkünstler[10] and Friedrich Carl Gottlieb Hirsching's Historisch-literarisches Handbuch.
[12] Occasionally Bach appears in other writings, like Johann Friedrich Köhler [wikisource:de]'s 1776 manuscript on the history of schools in Leipzig, which gives a short account of Bach falling out with Johann August Ernesti, conrector of the St. Thomas School.
1850, aus Thüringen, seinem Vaterlande,[16] and Carl L. Hilgenfeldt published Johann Sebastian Bach's Leben, Wirken und Werke: ein Beitrag zur Kunstgeschichte des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts (Johann Sebastian Bach's life, influence and works: a contribution to the art history of the 18th century) "als Programm zu dem am 28.
The biography contains some documents from Bach's time that had not been published before, presented with a wealth of historical inferences and personal reflections.
[21] Spitta's biography went down in history as "... the most ... comprehensive and important single work on Johann Sebastian Bach".
[23] In the United Kingdom the 19th-century Bach Revival was inscribed in existing traditions respecting baroque music.
[29] Lane Poole bases the biographical data entirely on Spitta, and adds a chronological list of 200 church cantatas by Bach.
Only by the end of the century, quarter of a millennium after the composer's death, new major biographies appeared by Eidam and Wolff.
[36] In its preface the author pays his homage to Spitta and excuses him for his specialised technicalities: for his new biography Parry proposes a more condensed survey of the topic.
[45] Werner Neumann, from 1951 director of the East-German section of the Neue Bach-Ausgabe (NBA), published several biographies of the composer.
In 1953 Auf den Lebenswegen Johann Sebastian Bachs, acclaimed by Alfred Dürr, the director of the West-German section of the NBA.
[53] In 1976 Barbara Schwendowius and Wolfgang Dömling published a collection of eleven essays by, among others, Wolff and Dürr under the title Johann Sebastian Bach : Zeit, Leben, Wirken.
[57] Denis Arnold's Bach appeared the next year,[58] as well as a new French biography by Roland de Candé,[59] and a German one by Werner Felix.
In 1997 he was the editor of the Cambridge Companion to Bach, with chapters written by Malcolm Boyd, Ulrich Siegele, Robin A. Leaver, Stephen A. Crist, Werner Breig, Richard D. P. Jones, Laurence Dreyfus, Stephen Daw, George B. Stauffer and Martin Zenck.
[62] Klaus Eidam's 1999 Das Wahre Leben des Johann Sebastian Bach (The True Life of Johann Sebastian Bach) tries to correct some misconceptions that crept in the biographical writing on the composer, based on a new perusal of primary sources.
[69] In the 21st century a sizeable portion of biographical material on Johann Sebastian Bach became available on-line, including full scans of older biographies that were no longer copyrighted.
[70] This, in turn, formed the basis for the jsbach website, presenting data about Bach's life in time table format.
In 2004 a new English biography of Bach, written by Peter Williams, was published by the Cambridge University Press.
[76] Apart from the biographies that take the reader from Bach's birth in 1685 to his death in 1750, several studies highlight specific aspects of the composer's life.
