Christoph Wolff has devoted much of his life’s work to demonstrating not just that music is a unifying force, but that musical research itself can also be a place in which scholars and musicians from various cultural backgrounds, regions, and even political convictions can come together for a common purpose. 

During the chaotic years after World War II, many invaluable sources for the works of J.S. Bach and others were scattered about Europe and the Soviet Union, and Christoph — the world’ most eminent expert on Bach’s music — was a leading figure in international efforts to locate, catalog, make available, and in some cases transfer these materials in a manner agreeable to all. 

If his role in these proceedings was often a diplomatic one, his motivation was a passion for the music, one that he consistently finds is shared by people in all parts of the world. 

Bach’s music has, over the course of three centuries, earned the privilege of being called “universal” as much as that of any composer. This is partly because through his music we can relate to a fundamental sense of humanity, “to universal human qualities and modes of expression and feeling,” Christoph said recently from his home in Freiburg, Germany. “That is the strength of the top-quality music.” 

On November 8th at Village Presbyterian Church, Bach Aria Soloists present Bach Unlocked featuring Dr. Christoph Wolff, a concert-with-talk that opens the ensemble’s 25th anniversary season SYNERGY. “It is a great honor to have Prof. Wolff come to Kansas City and offer his unique insights into Bach and his repertoire.” said Elizabeth Suh Lane, violinist and founding artistic director. “We wanted to start off our season with a kind of celebration to mark this milestone, and to celebrate our supporters,” 

The concert includes an inventive mix of chamber and vocal works for soprano (Sarah Tannehill Anderson), violin (Elizabeth), cello (guest artist Paula Kosower), and organ/harpsichord (Elisa Williams Bickers). 

“The program they have prepared gives a wonderful cross-section of Bach’s music,” said Christoph, a longtime fan of Bach Aria Soloists who has visited the series twice before, in 2007 and 2014.

“I’m very impressed with the style in which this ensemble presents the music of J.S. Bach,” he added. “Yes, they use ‘modern instruments,’ but in a very cogent and appealing way. Their programs are extremely balanced and interesting.” 

Prof. Wolff has published dozens of books and hundreds of articles on music from six centuries — but with a lifelong focus on Bach and Mozart. He led the Bach-Archiv in Leipzig and the Zentralinstitut für Mozart-Forschung in Salzburg, and he taught at Erlangen, Toronto, Princeton, and Columbia Universities before joining the Harvard faculty in 1976, serving there until his retirement in 2014. 

Teaching has allowed him to observe how great music can take root in the minds of students from wide-ranging experiences. The son of a theologian, he said he cannot help connecting Bach “to my background as a son of a Lutheran pastor … even though I’m no longer as religious as I used to be as a young person.” 

Yet, through the ages, Bach’s music has appealed to an incredibly diverse range of listeners. “If I share my experience with students who have different backgrounds, Jewish students or Muslim students or completely agnostic students, they can still get something out of Bach — even his sacred works.” 

To illustrate this, he called attention to the first vocal piece on the Soloists’ program, a soprano aria from Cantata No. 58 that begins “I am content in my sorrow, for God is my true confidence.” 

“The key words are content and sorrow and confidence,” Christoph said, “and these are human qualities. … It has nothing to do with God (necessarily), but we see the composer translate this kind of theological message into musical expression that speaks to a broader public.” 

Elizabeth, too, sees Bach as a common thread. She has observed that audiences for concerts of Bach’s music range widely in age and cultural background. She recalled an audience member and musical layperson who told her that no matter how much Bach she hears: “every time you play a concert, I love it even more.” 

Christoph’s discoveries have often made headlines, but none so spectacularly as that in 1999, when he and a large team found the long-lost library of the Berlin Sing-Akademie with its treasure of materials from the Bach family. It had lain “semi-hidden in plain sight” in Kiev for decades. 

Retrieving it required an international effort involving Americans, Russians, Ukrainians, and others — including German’s then-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma. It showed the extent to which the broader international community was willing (at that time, at least) to work together for the sake of music. 

Occasional discoveries notwithstanding, Christoph believes that we have found most of the hundreds of still-missing Bach works that we are likely to find. “There is always a possibility,” he said, “but I think we have exhausted all the leading indicators of the locations of lost Bach pieces.” 

We do, however, have a great deal of the best music. While some works written in “unfashionable genres” might have gone by the wayside, “the pieces that Bach cared about, that he gave to his students and that were copied by his students, have survived.” 

One important area of future research is that of the women of the Bach family. It seems likely that Bach’s daughters, at least, were active in several aspects of the family’s musical life, though it is difficult to trace any compositions to them. Still, as we have seen in other contexts, “behind a lot of the great male composers there were also women, some of whom were composers,” Elizabeth said. 

Moreover, “it’s about time” that we began this work, Christoph said. “I have three daughters, so I’m interested in carving out some research that relates to the history of women.” He recently finished an article on Bach’s wife, Anna Magdalena, in which he strives to show that this prominent soprano remained active throughout most of her life. 

“We have evidence that she didn’t give up her professional career … for at least 20 years after moving to Leipzig,” he said. Moreover, “the few documented performances indicate that she was performing at a level that required her to keep up her vocal technique. So I think that will give a new facet to Anna Magdalena: she was more than just the mother of Bach’s children and a copyist of some of his works … she was regularly involved in performances.” 

Christoph has also been a major figure in one of the least glamorous, and most important, areas of Bach research: that of chronology.

Today we can date Bach’s works with far more accuracy than ever before: And although the time at which a piece was composed might seem like random information, it can be crucial because it allows us to “place the piece in a context that relates to Bach’s development as a composer.” 

The result is an astonishing picture of how profoundly Bach’s style changed over his lifetime. “The difference between his early works and his late works is much greater than in the case of either Handel or Telemann,” Christoph said. “And that is really quite an amazing story: when you look at this composer who constantly tried to outdo himself … to experiment, to explore new ways of approaching musical composition.” 

—By Paul Horsley

For more information about the 25th season, which also includes the Annual Holiday Concert with Cameron J. Rolling, The Adventures of Don Quixote, and discounted seats for Helen Sung Meets Bach Aria Soloists, go to bachariasoloists.com. 

To reach Paul Horsley, performing arts editor, send an email to paul@kcindependent.com or find him on Facebook (paul.horsley.501) or Twitter/Instagram (@phorsleycritic).