What there is to know about Bach, Christoph Wolff knows. And everything Wolff...knows about Bach's life, he has poured into this new and magisterial biographical portrait...[Bach] is user-friendly, helpful, and entertainingly informative. Direct and illuminating commentary on Bach's major works, and on the major musical issues that Bach confronted, fill the book...[Wolff's] main text surrounds the facts of Bach's life with an invaluable sense of context--additional facts about musical life, courts, patronage, church doctrine, ecclesiastical and municipal politics...Wolff has provided every lover of Bach with a book to learn from.
   --Richard Dyer, Boston Globe

This volume will be useful not only to conductors, performers, and scholars, but to other listeners, myself included, who will be stimulated by it to find ever deeper levels of meaning in Bach's many-splendored genius...Christoph Wolff functions here as a philologist and palaeographer deciphering a complex manuscript, as a biographer contemplating the mysteries of continuity and change in the composer's long and productive career, as a demythologizer reviewing the legends about Bach with which we all grew up, as a social and intellectual historian placing the musical oeuvre into its total context, as a sensitive listener who even after all these years of research has not lost the capacity to hear and admire the miracle that is the music of Johann Sebastian Bach.
   --Jaroslav Pelikan, Sterling Professor of History, Yale University, author of Bach Among the Theologians