Books

magazine welcomed the appearance of Alfred Einstein’s post-war , praising a book ‘In which a great scholar, saturated in a subject unbends, sits back, and writes easily about it’. The reviewer could just as easily have been describing Christoph Wolff’s sequel (20 years in the making) to his Pulitzer-nominated . That book concerned itself primarily with biography; its successor tackles the music in greater depth, though not, moving on. The only major contradiction is of course the emergence of the second book of the ‘48’ composed some 20 years after the first. Some of Wolff’s observations might be contentious, and it’s a dense read that, from a layman’s perspective, presupposes familiarity with concepts such as the . But, as an object lesson in illuminating contextualisation, it’s an essential addition to any self-respecting Bach shelf. ★★★★