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The Life of Bach.

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The Life of Bach. By Peter Williams. (Musical Lives.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. [viii, 219 p. ISBN 0-521-82636-5. $60. (hbk.); ISBN 0-521-53374-0. $22. (pbk.).] Illustrations, bibliography, index.

Peter Williams's The Life of Bach, the fourteenth volume in Cambridge University Press's ongoing Musical Lives series, enters a densely populated, historically rich, and historiographically complex field of research. Following the findings of Alfred Durr and Georg von Dadelsen in the 1950s which cast new light on the chronology of Johann Sebastian Bach's compositional output, the classic biographies of Bach by Philipp Spitta and Albert Schweitzer have necessarily been regarded as problematic in as much as they convey inaccurate descriptions of the composer's creative life (Philipp Spitta, Johann Sebastian Bach [Leipzig: Breitkopf & Hartel, 1873-1880], and Albert Schweitzer, J. S. Bach: Le musicienpoete [Leipzig, Breitkopf & Hartel, 1905]). In addition, critics have amply demonstrated the intellectual problems with the concept of master narratives perpetuated in biographical works cast in the tradition of nineteenth-century scholarship, particularly of historic western-European men (for a summary of these issues, see Jolanta T. Pekacz, "Memory, History and Meaning: Musical Biography and its Discontents," Journal of Musicological Research 23 [2004]: 39-80). Given the difficulty of the task, Williams's volume is a significant contribution to the literature on Bach's life and works, offering as it does the valuable perspective of a scholar long engaged in understanding the composer's music.

The concise format of the Musical Lives series, whose volumes are generally about 200 pages in length, is well-suited to Williams's close focus on the biographical evidence found in Bach's music and the obituary of...

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