The New Bach Reader: A Life of Johann Sebastian Bach in Letters and Documents

Gathered in this fascinating volume are all the letters, reports, testimonials, complaints, thank-you notes, and other writings of J. S. Bach, together with a generous helping of performance and payment inventories, town council proceedings, court records, letters of appointment, and additional papers that document the fabric of the composer's daily life.
Here, in English translations that preserve the full flavor of the originals, we encounter more than four hundred ítems, among them: firsthand accounts of a street brawl involving the componer and one of his students; an orden detailing Bach's annual compensation as court organist (150 florins plus grain, barley, wood, and thirty pails of beer): an overview of Bach's teaching activities; 52 facsímiles of manuscriptn and prints; a complete inventory of Bach's estate; and numerous eighteenth- and nineteenth-century accounts of Bach and his works.

Edited by Hans T. DAvid and Arthur Mendel, revised and expanded by Christoph Wolff.

CONTENIDO:

Acknowledgements
Preface to The New Bach Reader
Preface to the First Edition of the Bach Reader (1945)
Bibliographical Abbreviations
Conspectus of parts I-VII
Chronology

I. Johann Sebastian Bach. A Portrait in Outline
II. Bach's Life in His Own Writings and Other Outline
III. Early Biographical Documents on Bach
IV. Bach as Viewed by His Contemporaries
V. Bach in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century
VI. Forkel's Biography of Bach (1802/1820)
VII. Bach in the Romantic Era

Appendix: Money and Living Cost in Bach's Time
Bibliography
Index
Places of Bach's Activities