[彭蒙惠英语] 重新认识巴赫(1/2)

When he was thirteen years old, J.S. Bach copied out Dietrich Buxtehude's most complicated organ work in the same florid, sophisticated music script that we know from his adult years. But it took scholars nearly 250 years to rediscover the copy in an archive in Weimar, Germany, a few years ago. The work reveals that Bach was already an accomplished musician as he entered his teens. This is just one piece of a vast picture now forming of a composer whose life has remained frustratingly obscure. In fact, if Bach is the greatest composer Western civilization has produced, he is also the major figure we know least about. However, a new generation of scholars is changing that.

"Pulling Bach down to earth"

The driving force is Christoph Wolff, a German-born Harvard University professor whose writings devoted to Bach would fill a small library. Wolff's biography, Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician, was at once a capstone of 40 years of Bach research and a springboard for more. Wolff said that most Bach material resides in archives, which lay under East German rule after 1945. Only since the fall of communism in the 1990s have scholars had access to the archives. And many of the tools of modern scholarship were not available before World War II.

Now, thanks to a renewed push, beginning in 2002 by the Bach-Archiv in Leipzig, which Wolff heads, we are learning new things about Bach practically every week. In five years 120 Bach-related items have been discovered by a team of scholars that has spread out across Germany like a pack of FBI agents hunting a fugitive. "Some of the effect of this work is pulling Bach down to earth," Wolff said. "It makes him a more credible human being than the abstract composer close to heaven he is so often portrayed as."

Vocabulary Focus

florid (adj) ---having too much decoration or detail

springboard (n) ---something which provides you either with the opportunity to follow aparticular plan of action, or the encouragement that is needed to make it successful

Specialized terms

Dietrich Buxtehude (1637-1707) ---狄崔克*布克斯特胡德，巴洛克时期的作曲家和管风琴家a German-Danish music composer and organist in the Baroque period

archive (n) ---历史档案；资料库a collection of historical records relating to a place, organization or family

capstone (n) ---颠峰；顶点a culmination or point of full development

              

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