The new Bach reader: A life of Johann Sebastian Bach in letters and documents - Edited by Hans T. David and Arthur Mendel

Gathered in this fascinating volume are all the letters, reports, testimonials, complaints, mouth-to-mouth stories, 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 items, among them: firsthand accounts of a street brawl involving the composer and one of his students; an order 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 facsimiles of manuscripts and prints; a complete inventory of Bach’s estate; and numerous eighteenth- and nineteenth-century accounts of Bach and his works.