J.S. Bach: A Life in Music  Peter Williams Cambridge University Press: 978-0-521-30683-6 / 405pp / £16.99

The Journal of the London Bach Society has already described Peter Williams’ ‘innovative biography as ‘imaginative and fresh’, and Williams (himself an acclaimed scholar and performer) has illuminated new aspects of the composer’s life, utilising (among other things) a new examination of Bach’s obituary, integrating recently discovered information.

We are shown the composer’s parlous early life as an orphan and his comfortable, bourgeois adulthood as a family man (with that prodigally gifted cadre of offspring). Perhaps the heart of the book is something surprising – a new way to regard Bach’s genesis as composer and performer. Succeeding biographies have a new benchmark to aspire to.