A story of four women's search for spiritual peace. Agnes is dying of cancer and is visited one last time by her two sisters, Karin and Maria. These two become entangled in feelings of jealousy, manipulation and selfishness. Yet Agnes is able to transcend her sisters' pettiness to remember moments of staggering beauty as well as horror.

"A Pulitzer Prize- winning critic reflects on the meaning and emotional impact of a Bach masterwork. As his mother was dying, Philip Kennicott began listening to the music of Bach obsessively, and spent the next five years trying to learn one of the composer's greatest keyboard masterpieces, the Goldberg Variations. In Counterpoint, he recounts his efforts to rise to the challenge, and to fight through his grief by coming to terms with memories of...

"In 1727, Stefan Silbermann is a grief-stricken thirteen-year-old, struggling with the death of his mother and his removal to a school in distant Leipzig. Despite his father's insistence that he try not to think of his mother too much, Stefan is haunted by her absence, and, to make matters worse, he's bullied by his new classmates. But when the school's cantor, Johann Sebastian Bach, takes notice of his new pupil's beautiful singing voice and draws...

Highlights the life and achievements of the eighteenth-century German composer and musician, and examines the development of his most important compositions.

"A comprehensive and fascinating study of the overall creative output of Johann Sebastian Bach, capturing the essence of his art. In this companion volume to his Pulitzer Prize-finalist biography, Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician, leading Bach scholar Christoph Wolff contextualizes his famous subject by delving deeply into the composer's rich collection of music. Emerging from this complex and massive oeuvre, Bach's Musical Universe is...

Dan Moller grew up listening to heavy metal in the Boston suburbs. But something changed when he dug out his mother's record of The Art of the Fugue, inexplicably wedged between 16 ABBA Hits and Kenny Rogers. Moller became fixated on Bach and his music, but only learned to play it for himself as an adult. Here, Moller draws us into the strange and surprisingly funny world of the composer and his scene. Did you know The Goldberg Variations contain...

Gathered in this volume are all the letters, reports, testimonials, complaints, thank-you notes, and other writings of J.S. Bach, together with a generous helping of performance and payment inventories, town council proceedings, court and archival records, letters of appointment, and other 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...