In the century following the writing of Spitta's monograph on the life of J. S. Bach, the Leipzig Archive has accumulated nearly double the source repertory known to that biographer. Subsequent investigations--Schweitzer (1905), Terry (1928), Steglich (1935), Geiringer (1966), and Boyd (1983)--while incorporating information to which Spitta could not possibly have had access, are built nevertheless upon the predecessor's sometimes flawed assumptions.

Christoph Wolff's Bach represents, therefore, a critical re-evaluation that is long overdue. It is fortunate that such an evaluation should have been undertaken by one who is arguably the world's preeminent connoisseur of Bach's life and music: the scholar who recently restored to the repertory such lost works as the fourteen canons on the "Goldberg" ground and the thirty-three pre-Weimar preludes. Here, in one folio, Wolff collects his thoughts as represented in twenty-five years of essays, half of them now speaking English for the first time. Wolff's essays read as well as his insights conclusions (and speculations) are cogent, sometimes brilliant, but always eloquent.

In "Outlines of a Musical Portrait" (eight essays), Wolff sketches a man supremely driven, organized, equipped, and disciplined. Bach orchestrated his career, Wolff contends, with the same finesse he would a concerto. Contrary to the popular portrait of a provincial cantor, swallowed by the the routine of his own musical orbit, Wolff's Bach is sponge-like, forever absorbing the nationalistic, stylistic, historical and theoretical idioms of greater Europe. Wolff focuses our attention anew upon Palestrina (stile antico), Reinken (North German school other than Buxtehude), and Vivaldi (concerted style), whose influences surely have been underestimated.

In "New Sources: Broadened Perspectives" (six essays) Wolff weaves into the picture a tapestry of recently discovered manuscripts having significance not merely as restorations of lost repertory but for our understanding of works earlier extant. Yale University's Lowell Mason manuscript 4708, for example, is not only a most important repository of early works--thirty-three chorale preludes dating perhaps as far back as Ohrdruf--but also permits Wolff to discern the influence of distant relation Johann Michael Bach upon the nascent compositional efforts of Sebastian.

The recent discovery of the Handexemplar of the Goldberg Variations Wolff calls "the most important Bach source that has come to light in a generation" (p. 163). He proposes that they substantiate--as the Musical Offering, and Art of Fugue are indicative of--Bach's preoccupation with monothematicism during his last decade. The interest coincided with a seemingly paradoxical study of stile antico while at the same time a pursuance of modern trends.

With respect to better known works, Wolff discloses a model Mass by Dresden composer von Wilderer that Bach may have parodied in the first Kyrie of his B Minor. Wolff also reveals that the aggrandized version of Ein feste Burg was not authorized by Johann Sebastian's eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann. While it is true that Friedemann did adapt two movements to a different text--an adaptation to which he added trumpets and timpani--it is an historical impropriety to perform Sebastian's cantata thus.

In "Old Sources Revisited: Novel Aspects" (seven essays) Wolff disabuses the reader of still more Bachianna by demonstrating that the chorale Wenn wir in hoechsten Noethen zein is not, as traditionally advertised, a deathbed utterance. It was added to the Art of Fugue, rather, to compensate for editorial haste if not incompetence (inability to decipher the conclusion of the preceding Fuga a 3 Soggetti). Of greater significance, Wolff contends that the latter composition was not terminated, following the BACH exposition, in the exigency of imminent demise. At the time of Bach's death the contrapuntist had been revising the fugues of his "last" tour de force for nearly a decade--the triple fugue (quadruple by conception) had probably been completed.

"Concepts, Style, and Chronology" (seven essays) probe the formal dimensions of Bach's late works whose cyclic dispositions, Wolff concludes, "emanate apparently from the thought that the microcosmic order must be mirrored in a macrocosmic order in rational correspondence" (p. 358). It is a thoughtful, and thought provoking, discussion.

In "Early Reception and Artistic Legacy" (four essays) Wolff revisits the milieu and writings of Bach's contemporaries as they comment upon aspects of composition, criticism, analysis, and aesthetics. Because Bach declined to describe himself or his work in such prosaic terms (Wolff notes that Bach's distrust of his own way with words perhaps caused him to engage Birnbaum as champion against Scheibe), Wolff's insights are illuminating. If we could not listen to Bach's music, we might at least find Wolff's words the next best way to get inside the composer's head.

Wolff's thematical format allows him a depth of exposition more substantive than those of his chronologically minded counterparts. Yet, the strength of his format is also its weakness for in his frames and proofs Wolff inevitably admits several redundancies. The Scheibe-Birnbaum controversy is mentioned at least four times while the problem of order in the Art of the Fugue receives scrutiny twice (a pagination argument followed, seven essays later, by an argument theoretical). The reader whose interests are these might have been assisted by a synthesis of ideas that--in the book's current configuration--are scattered hither and yon.

It is perhaps a measure of the significance of Wolff's tract that he is able to speculate, while at the same time chipping away the accretions of myth surrounding the monolith, without dimming Bach's hallowed reputation among musicians. To the contrary, the reader of these essays will--inasmuch as Wolff's represents an attempt to carve an image breathing neither flattery nor flatulence--still see the halo, somewhat unctuous, but undimmed.