Missouri Classical Music News and Notes

Mr. Geck, a professor at the University of Dortmund in Germany who has written extensively about Bach, is a committed and erudite scholar, and his “Johann Sebastian Bach: Life and Work” — published in German in 2000, the 250th anniversary of Bach’s death, and now translated into English by John Hargraves — is a consummation of much of his own life and work. It adds original scholarship to an exhaustive survey of other studies of Bach. And although it is often dense with information, it is just as often entertaining: rich in anecdotes and scintillating in its conjectures. . . .

Throughout, Mr. Geck is intent on disposing of the standard mythology. “Insisting that Bach was unappreciated during his lifetime has become part of the Bach hagiography,” he writes, “mostly thanks to self-important commentators.”

Those who have followed the recent wars over the size of Bach’s chorus — was it a chorus as we know it or simply the sum of the soloists on hand for a given performance? — will be interested to know that Mr. Geck leans toward the minimalists. “Lean staffing may be the rule rather than the exception,” he writes, while allowing that “perhaps there is no such thing as the Bach choir; perhaps he conducted performances with choirs of varying sizes.”