King’s gambit accepted

Although for more than a century Johann Sebastian Bach has been one of the Western world’s most popular classical composers, it is surprising how little those who love his music know about him as a human being — unlike the others at the top of the list, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms or Schubert. Bach’s most recent definitive biographer is the Harvard professor Christoph Wolff, who apologises to his readers on the grounds that Bach’s life ‘lacks exciting dimensions and does not lend itself to a narrative that focuses on and is woven around a chronological list of dates and events’. There are no diaries, very few letters, and a shortage of personal accounts of his contemporaries’ relationships with him. The first book about his life was published more than half a century after he died, written by a musicologist called Johann Nikolaus Forkel, who knew Bach’s sons and whose main objective was to represent Bach as a German national hero.