Bach

By Martin Geck

Johann Sebastian Bach was the father of modern music, a supreme craftsman who was able to combine the order of the middle ages with the passionate individualism of the renaissance. Bach expert Martin Geck shows us Bach in his time, offering a rich portrait of the personal, political and social circumstances which shaped some of the greatest music ever written.

‘The author makes judicious use of letters, contemporary reports and limpid accounts of harmony and counterpoint to put the man (sociable, funny, arrogant, worried about money) back into the music. The production values of the book are exquisite, too.’
Steven Poole, The Guardian, 27 September 2003

Martin Geck studied musicology, theology and philosophy at Münster, Berlin and Kiel. He took his doctorate in 1962 and in 1966 became the founding editor of the Gesamtausgabe of the works of Richard Wagner. He wrote a number of musicological textbooks and was appointed full professor of musicology at Dortmund University in 1976. He has edited and written many books, articles and entries into encyclopaedic works on the history of German music in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, concentrating on the work of Schütz, Buxtehude, Brahms, Bach, Beethoven, E T A Hoffmann, Mendelssohn-Bartholdy and Wagner.

He is also the author of Beethoven (Haus Publishing, 2003), published in the same Series, with an introduction by Peter Sheppard Skærved, the leader of the Kreutzer Quartet and Research Fellow at the Royal Academy of Music, London.

This book is introduced by John Butt, Lecturer in Music at Cambridge University and Gardiner Chair of Music at Glasgow University. He is the editor of Cambridge Companion to Bach and has also performed and recorded music by Bach all around the world.