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Article: Bach to the future.(Johann Sebastian Bach: Life and Work)(Book review)
- Article from:
- First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life
- Article date:
- March 1, 2007
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2007 Institute on Religion and Public Life. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH: LIFE AND WORK by MARTIN GECK Harcourt, 752 pages, $40
THE COLLECTED WORKS of Johann Sebastian Bach take up slightly more than six feet of shelf space and, according to the list on ArkivMusic.com, are represented by almost five thousand recordings commercially available. (Only Mozart has more.)
Add to this music all the nonmusical archival material and the near mountain of secondary materials on Bach and you have a continent of data that must daunt the most intrepid biographer. But Martin Geck, now nearing the end of his career at the University of Dortmund, doesn't seem intimidated by Herculean tasks. Having begun his career ...